ORLANDO, Fla. — At this year’s AHR Expo, executives from Armstrong Fluid Technology presented a vision of buildings that are not only smart, but that learn.
“Your building now has a brain,” said Rodney Hightower, Armstrong’s U.S. commercial director.
One benefit of smart building is increased efficiency. Brent Ross, Armstrong’s director of configured and standard building products, introduced the new Design Envelope 6800 boosters. A key component of this system is Booster Manager, a cloud-based performance management system. Booster Manager delivers analytics and performance insights, including profiles of energy and water consumption. Through continuous performance management, reports, and alerts, Booster Manager increases reliability and sustains optimal performance in a booster system.
Armstrong also announced two new products: Opti-Point and Evercool. Opti-Point is a self-learning optimization technology that enables active performance management by creating a digital twin of a mechanical system and learning its operating characteristics in real time. It optimizes system efficiency and reduces energy consumption by as much as 50 percent compared to traditional system designs. It also safeguards system optimization by addressing mechanical drift and performance degradation. Employing predictive diagnostics and condition-based maintenance.
Evercool is an automation platform for mission critical cooling systems. The platform offers pre-engineered, feature-rich options that can be configured on-site. The platform meets the requirements of the Uptime Institute for Tier III data centers, while avoiding the traditional requirements of extensive site programming and customization. Evercool uses a design with internal redundancy and a hot-standby controller for continuous uptime.
Peter Thomsen, Armstrong’s director of building system solutions, said this means a transfer between controllers before a motor blade even completes one spin. Thomsen said these systems will work to turn the concept of building systems upside down.
“Rather than buildings degrading in efficiency as they age, buildings will improve in efficiency as they age,” he said.
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