Identifying Temperature Control Issue Results in Energy Savings

CIM's PEAK platform highlights efficiency issues in real-time. This empowers facilities teams to fix issues faster, and before they become energy drains or interrupt production. The example below highlights a recent issue from a leading micro electronic manufacturing client.

Issue

The PEAK platform detected a temperature rise in a specific zone within the micro electronic manufacturing facility. The average temperature should have been 22.5 °C, but was instead reading 25 °C.

Temperature increases present a risk to manufacturers for a number of reasons:

• In controlled or critical environments, like clean rooms, a rise in air temperature can result in downtime, loss of production and lower revenue.
• Higher temperatures also have a negative impact on employee productivity.
• Equipment lifespan can also be impacted by higher average temperatures, causing potential downtime and revenue loss.

The graph below shows the relationship between a fan coil unit (FCU) zone temperature sensor and a FCU zone temperature setpoint. In the section shaded blue, you can see that the PEAK rules engine has alerted the end-user to a deviation between setpoint and the actual zone temperature.

In the top part of the chart, PEAK has also alerted the end user to the chilled water valve being 100% open while the zone temperature is more than 2 °C over setpoint.

Action

Upon investigation by the on-site facilities team, it was determined that the fan coil unit (FCU) heating actuator was faulty while in the open position. This fault caused the system to send chilled water in an attempt to compensate for the fault resulting.

With this information, the site team knew they needed to replace the faulty actuator. The part was ordered immediately, and now the zone is back at the correct average temperature of 22.5°C.

Result

Now that the system is running fault free, the chilled water system is no longer battling to compensate for the fan coil unit (FCU) actuator error. This has resulted in significant energy savings for the facility.