OPIT Application: Active Energy Management Solution

[LFale1]

Market: Power & Energy

Location: Switzerland

Technology Partner: Opit Solutions

Project Introduction

Energy demands are increasing and the environment is under constant pressure. As nations

look for alternative energy sources, the implementation of energy-saving strategies has become

more important than ever. Notably, almost 40% of total energy production is used for

buildings. Of this energy, over one-third is consumed for space and water heating and the remainder

is used for ventilation, air conditioning and artificial lighting.

A customer in Europe aiming to analyze and optimize their energy consumption and efficiency

across several buildings wanted to build an energy management system that was capable of

gathering energy data from different suppliers. With these targets in mind, they contacted OPIT

Solutions to help them develop their system and provide them with the means to save energy.

System Requirements

The goal was to create an active energy management system to monitor and improve power

distribution management across a large number of buildings to guarantee efficient energy

usage. The solution needed the ability to monitor power consumption and the behavior of the

controlling devices at each building in real-time, adjust power consumption according to each

device's needs, and improve efficiency. In addition, the customer required a benchmark system

to compare the specific energy consumption for similar buildings.

Hans Burkard from OPIT Solutions said, "Due to the variety of technologies in the building, we

needed to collect data from different suppliers, therefore we chose an Advantech UNO-series

hardware platform which offers a variety of interfaces like RS-232/485, USB and TCP/IP, to collect

data to a central database."

System Description

An UNO-2174A embedded automation computer from Advantech was chosen for its multiple

communication ports and its fanless rugged low maintenance design with IP40 anti-dust ingress

protection and wide operating temperature range. The UNO-2174 also supports 1 x PC/104+

and 1 x PCI-104 plug-in cards for further expansion.

The system's Intel® Atom® N450 processor delivers significant power savings itself, as well as

performance improvements over previous generation processors. It includes Enhanced Intel®

Deeper Sleep for reduced power consumption and Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology for

high performance-per-watt efficiency and increased system reponsiveness.

According to Hans, "During the migration phase we had one or two issues to solve and it was

good to know that there was always somebody on the other end of the phone with technical

or sales knowledge. We considered several products during our evaluation phase, and our

R&D department tested them all down

to the board level. We saw the

real quality behind Advantech

products, and with this

kind of support it

was really a simple

choice."