Control Network Newsletter

BACnet® Protocol Continues to Help Advance Building Ratings

February 2016 - The benefits of providing Contemporary Controls' device-to-internet BACnet solutions are entirely evident with the Henderson 688 project. Henderson 688, located in Shanghai, PRC, is a "BEAM Plus" platinum award winning building. Square footage consists of 60,627 m2 of office space and 4,500 m2 of retail space. The high-end office building caters to international tenants and has 24 floors above ground and 3 floors below. (BEAM sets a standard in sustainable building design by measuring a building's environmental performance. Research shows buildings with a BEAM Plus Platinum rating on average consume 30% less energy than baseline values compared to their predecessors. Statistics also show a decrease in operating costs by 13.6% for new green construction. Designers, clients and others are encouraged to think about low carbon and low impact design strategies when designing buildings, minimizing the energy demands created by a building before taking energy efficiency and low carbon technologies into consideration).

A new Building Management System (BMS) was installed in the building with the intent to accommodate future expansion plans. The System Integrator chose Contemporary Controls due to product dependability and wealth of experience serving the building automation industry with devices that support the BACnet open standard protocol. The property owner had a specific task in mind, which was to make sure that the newly installed BMS ran properly and was cost-effective. Just as important, the BMS had to stand up to the demanding needs of the buildings temperature fluctuations, no easy task considering the buildings envelope consists mostly of glass.

The installed BMS includes a Honeywell Webs system with a Niagara AX Supervisor, 4 JACE-600 building controllers and 1900 Spyder VAV and unitary controllers. The building occupies over 1800 VAV controllers with 75 VAV controllers per floor. Each MS/TP segment consists of 28-48 Spyders and one Contemporary Controls' BASrouter. Fifty-one Contemporary Controls' BASrouters are used to interconnect the Spyder BACnet MS/TP communication ports to BACnet/IP ports on the JACEs. The BASrouters off-load the MS/TP communications burden from the JACE and by doing so reduce the quantity of JACEs needed for supervising the Spyder controllers reduced device quantities results in cost-savings. Ethernet communication is handled by Contemporary Controls' CTRLink line of Skorpion 8 and 16-port 10/100 Mbps Ethernet switches.

Using a BACnet/IP backbone of wired and wireless Ethernet, Contemporary Controls' offers a complete and economical BMS solution with all the necessary building automation elements - communication, integration, control and visualization.