Page 20 - Climate Control News September 2019

Air Movement, Fans and Ventilation
LEFT AND BELOW: Australian entrepeneur, David Soo, inside his growing facility for vanilla beans.
Creating the right climate for local entrepreneurs
SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC HAS partnered with local entrepreneur David Soo to create Austral- ia’s first growing facility for vanilla beans, the second most valuable spice in the world market.
The Vanilla Dome in Newcastle, New South Wales, uses Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure Food and Beverage technology solutions to rep- licate the delicate conditions needed to grow vanilla beans which are normally produced in tropical regions.
“Vanilla is exceptionally difficult to grow, and 80 per cent of the world’s vanilla is grown in Madagascar from a French vine called Bourbon Vanilla,” Soo said.
“Pollination has to be done by hand and drying and fermenting is a long and painstaking process. “Using Schneider Electric technology allows
us to offer a solution to growing vanilla in a sus- tainable way. We can create a Madagascan cli- mate in Newcastle in the middle of winter.”
Vanilla is worth more by weight than silver be- cause of a number of factors, including vanilla bean theft, complex pollination, extreme tropi- cal weather, the move away from artificial vanil- la and the rise of natural food.
The Schneider Electric automation system cre- ated a tropical climate through the opening and closing of vents, turning on misting and heating systems and managing irrigation and humidity.
The vanilla plants grow on a three dimension- al rotating trellis.
By rotating and repositioning the plants daily, they grow faster and healthier.
The solution also allows for central man-
agement and critical response over a wide area network to deal with problems quickly and efficiently either at the site or remotely via a mobile device.
The dome is 11 metres in diameter and has ap- proximately 95sqm of floor space, an internal volume of 350 cubic metres, and can withstand 160-kilometre winds, rain and hail.
It can hold 200 vines each with a length of 20 metres, the equivalent of 4km of vines to pro- duce a yield of 40,000 beans per harvest when fully mature.
Soo is now planning to develop and expand the Dome Greenhouse technology across Australia.
The director of industrial automation at Sch- neider Electric, Brad Yager, said projects like Va- nilla Dome represent the future of horticulture.
Remote management
for humidification systems
CAREL HAS INTRODUCED remote supervi- sory services adding even more value to its prod- uct range.
Supervisory services have now also become an integral part of the standard CAREL solution for humidification, facilitating installation, sys- tem management and maintenance.
tERA is the CAREL platform that creates a centralised remote management system for all HVAC applications, and has been recently up- graded for humidification systems.
tERA services can be used to remotely display and modify the humidifier variables, with consequent benefits
in terms of ease of management. tERA ensures fast and simple ac-
cess to all the information needed to optimise the work of the site’s technical and service team.
The solution also provides graphs and dash- boards relating to overall system performance: valuable tools that help optimise performance and save energy.
tERA services also provide alarm notifications in real time: maintenance personnel are prompt- ly alerted by message or email, and can take ac- tion to solve the problem via a remote connec- tion. This minimises downtime and ensures a better service for customers.
The benefits are twofold: maintenance tech- nicians save time and money in their work, while end customers can rely on more
efficient and prompt service.
Finally, heaterSteam titanium is
the world’s only humidifier with tita- nium heaters, and it is also the first in the CAREL range to be covered by the
renewed tERA supervisory proposal.
The world’s only humidifier with titanium heaters.
The reliability of titanium, combined with over-temperature protection, makes heater- Steam the natural solution for applications where service continuity is crucial. heaterSteam is also equipped with a new touch display de- signed to improve the user experience in humid- ifier management. ✺
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