Overview
The Aerospace Corporation is a mission critical facility that provides services to the U. S. Air Force. In support of this a virtual central plant system connecting four existing building plants was previously implemented to improve redundancy and overall system efficiency. This required a sophisticated control sequence and pumping scheme to ensure the plant loads were balanced and all failure modes were addressed. The major challenges were ensuring the design team fully understood the system operation and the programming staff had in depth central plant programming experience.
Challenge
The Aerospace Corporation is a mission critical facility that provides services to the U. S. Air Force. In support of this a virtual central plant system connecting four existing building plants was previously implemented to improve redundancy and overall system efficiency. This required a sophisticated control sequence and pumping scheme to ensure the plant loads were balanced and all failure modes were addressed. The major challenges were ensuring the design team fully understood the system operation and the programming staff had in depth central plant programming experience.
Action
During the design phase our staff reviewed the design documents and control sequences. In addition, we provided the design engineer and facility with an in-depth review of the current system operation, pumping schemes and requested operational improvements.
Once the project was under construction we reviewed all controls submittals and sequences. We coordinated with the control contractor’s programming staff to resolve questions and prepared pre-functional device tests and functional sequence tests.
P2S also provided construction site observation services to ensure efficient integration.
Results
The project was successfully commissioned without impacting the overall operation of the facility. All operational modes and failure modes were tested. There were no unresolved device or operational issues at the completion of commissioning.
