Daikin's water-side optimisation solutions can help improve the operating energy efficiency of chiller plants, resulting in savings on both energy and costs.

Daikin's global policy is to provide green and sustainable air-conditioning solutions for buildings. As such, we have come up with water-side optimisation solutions that can help improve and make the most of the operating energy efficiencies of chiller plants. These can be used alongside our efficient equipment for a complete and energy-efficient solution to meet your building's air-conditioning requirements.

What is a Building Management System (BMS)?

Building management systems or BMS typically provide automated control of the building’s operating systems to meet comfort and energy efficiency requirements. These systems may include air-conditioning systems, lighting systems, and other electrical and mechanical services. However, they might not be able to provide the intelligent and consistent optimisation that is needed to achieve maximum energy savings.

When applied to a chiller plant room system, the BMS system will always need ad-hoc customisation to cater to changing building or environmental conditions. This process of fine-tuning is usually manual and non-intuitive and represents a limitation. While web accessibility, performance measurement, reports, CO2 emissions calculations, and communication with other systems may be possible with the BMS, it will still very much depend on the existing system constraints. There is also limited support in maintenance with a BMS system, and efficiency verification at real time is typically not available. Daikin's iPlant Manager hopes to change all that.

What is Daikin's iPlant Manager?

iPlant Manager is Daikin's new-generation smart plant room optimisation and control software system. It was specifically created to achieve optimum control of every device in a single synergistic system, making it the best investment in terms of saving on your energy bills for commercial and industrial buildings.

With Daikin's proven knowledge and experience in the field of air-conditioning, the iPlant Manager was created to manage plant room HVAC equipment effectively. With it, you can measure the actual operating efficiency of the system in real-time and compare it with the ideal operating performance. This way, you can detect poor performances, fault, and system degradation very early on, apply the necessary remedial actions automatically and thereby ensure that the optimised efficiency levels are maintained consistently throughout its life cycle. To prevent faults, the iPlant Manager will notify the building management and chiller service crew for immediate service maintenance that reduces downtime.

How Does iPlant Manager Work?

Upon installation, iPlant Manager connects to a building’s chiller plant equipment and begins to provide complete measurements of the plant room’s key components. These measurements can be accessed both locally and remotely via a user-friendly interface for the benefit of maintenance crew, facility owners and other stakeholders.

The easily configurable iPlant Manager’s software commences a continuous performance feedback loop that is powered by intelligent self-learning algorithms. These algorithms calculate the real-time operating efficiencies of each chiller plant equipment in real time and compares these efficiencies against the achievable ideal operating efficiencies.

After running the data analytics to determine the chiller plant’s operating efficiencies, iPlant Manager performs adjustments and determines the best unit sequence to be activated, automatically, according to the performance profile of each unit. This results in immediate energy and cost savings.

The iPlant Manager system can be operated as a standalone system or be natively integrated into a new or existing building management system (BMS) interface via the Niagara Framework.

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