Mark Vender
In the lead-up to the AIRAH Awards 2021 gala on February 17, HVAC&R News is profiling the finalists in different award categories.
The Excellence in Innovation category, sponsored by Mitsubishi Electric, is open to all individuals, companies, corporate bodies, institutions and government authorities. It recognises significant Australian improvements in the areas of HVAC&R achieved through innovation, including new or significantly improved systems or plant and equipment or processes. Products are not eligible in this category, and the project must have been commissioned in the past two years.
The finalists in this category are:
A.G. Coombs and Aurecon, 25 King Street
Australia’s tallest engineered timber office building, 25 King has pushed boundaries in design, construction, indoor environment quality and sustainability.
The project achieved WELL core and shell certification at Platinum level, Green Star 6 star Design and As Built v1.1 rating, NABERS 6 star base building energy, 4.5 star water ratings, 3.0 star NABERS waste rating, and Climate Active carbon-neutral certification.
The challenges presented by this large-scale prefabricated engineered timber construction were addressed through the close collaboration and innovation of Aurecon and A.G. Coombs, delivering a model for future HVAC design and installation in this sustainable form of construction.
Glaciem Cooling Technologies, Advancing Renewable Energy with Thermal Energy Storage
This innovative project aims to demonstrate the technical and economic value of thermal energy storage using phase change material (PCM) and renewable energy optimisation in the commercial and industrial HVAC&R sector.
Conducted across three sites – in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria – the project received $1.96M of funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) to integrate more than 1.1MW of solar PV with 7.91MW/h of PCM thermal energy storage (equivalent to about 2.86MWh of electric battery storage), controlled with a cloud-based control algorithm across three of the largest HVAC&R sectors: process heating/cooling, commercial building HVAC, and cold storage.
Exergenics, Queensland Children’s Hospital – exOptima Digital Twin
Exergenics modelled a digital twin of the 18MW capacity chilled-water plant at Queensland Children’s Hospital using historical BMS data. This MATLAB-based tool was able to accurately simulate the fluid flows, temperatures and energy transfers through the chillers, pumps and cooling towers.
An optimisation loop was deployed on the simulation, seeding the model with thousands of combinations of ambient weather conditions and internal cooling loads. The result was an optimised control strategy, including chiller staging, chiller load balancing and condenser water temperature algorithm. The energy-saving simulation showed a 7 per cent energy reduction through the updated control logic.
The winner of the Excellence in Innovation award and all the other AIRAH Awards 2021 categories will be announced at the AIRAH Awards 2021 gala on Thursday, February 17, 2022 in Sydney.
For more information, and to register, go to www.airah.org.au/awards
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