Federation Complex.
The Federation Complex, being built by Mirax Group, is the largest high-rise construction project not only in the Moscow City business center, but in all of Russia. Upon completion, the building will consist of two towers, West and East, 243 and 360 m high, respectively, as well as a central spire 435 m high. The total area of the towers will be more than 420 thousand m². It is planned to house corporate offices, apartments, as well as restaurants, shopping and entertainment centers.
A distinctive feature of this project is the use of integrated intelligent building management. In the Federation Tower, all engineering systems are automated: ventilation, air conditioning, heating, water supply, drainage, sewerage, electricity, fire alarm, etc.
In the «West» tower alone, it is planned to install more than 7,500 units of equipment from different manufacturers. The total number of connection points for various devices to the automation system is 16,800, the length of connecting cables is measured in tens of kilometers. Such «saturation» of the building with technical devices poses the task of constructing a Building Management System. The specialists of «ARMO-GROUP», who developed the automation project for the already erected «West» tower, chose the Building Management System (BMS) standard for this, which is now widely used in the creation of «smart» buildings.
In particular, the Metasys M5 SCADA system developed by Johnson Controls was used at this facility. Its advantage is its multi-level distributed architecture, which allows the building's life support systems to be combined into a single fault-tolerant infrastructure. The modular organization principle and wide scalability capabilities make it possible to connect up to 32 thousand control points to the system, and to do this gradually, as individual floors of the building are put into operation.
The facility management system has a three-level structure: the first is represented by controllers united in field networks; the second is network processes that collect information; the third level is servers and workstations designed to control engineering equipment, maintain an archive of data and alarms.
The BACNet protocol is used to transmit data at the upper level (management level). At the «field» level, it was decided to use another popular standard — LON. With its help, for example, data is transmitted to the central control panel from heat and electricity meters.
«This technology is very convenient for the building owner, who can easily combine all signals from the engineering equipment into a single circuit and control it as he sees fit,» says Artur Aleksandrov, construction director of the Federation complex.
Simple advantages of complex technologies
Automation of the engineering systems of the «Federation» is dictated not by the fashion for high-tech solutions, but by economic calculations. According to the results of research by the Swiss Association of Manufacturers of Equipment for Ventilation and Air Conditioning, the cost of a modern automation system is up to 15% of the costs of the entire building. At the same time, due to the reduction of operating costs and the costs of electricity, water and heat by 20-30%, the payback period of such a system is 3-5 years.
According to Andrey Golovin, Director of the BIG-RU Building Automation Association, until recently, the active development of intelligent building management systems in our country was hampered by the poor awareness of potential customers about the experience of creating such facilities and low prices on the domestic market for energy and labor, which allowed not to think much about the cost of operating the facility. But now resource-saving technologies are becoming a mandatory element of any modern project.
The advantages of using automatic solutions are clearly illustrated by the example of the organization of the heat and electricity metering system implemented in the apartments of the West Tower with a total area of over 9,000 m2, located on floors 51-56. A total of 82 MULTICAL® heat meters and 41 electricity meters from Kamstrup, the world leader in the production of ultrasonic heat metering devices, are installed here. Two calculators are installed in separate boards for each apartment. The first one takes into account the readings of ULTRAFLOW® flow converters installed on the supply and return heating pipes, respectively. Flow meters that control the supply and circulation of hot water are connected to it via pulse dividers. The second calculator takes into account the cooling energy and the supply of cold water, and it also receives data from the electricity meter via a special module. This scheme ensures the centralization of the consumption of all resources simultaneously.
According to ARMO-GROUP specialists, at the design stage, the most optimal metering devices for this facility were selected based on such parameters as accuracy and consistency of metrological characteristics, long service life, compactness and ease of installation. The decisive factors that determined the choice of the brand of equipment were the ability to transfer data to a single system via the LON protocol and excellent technical support from Kamstrup specialists.
The automatic meter reading system provides access to real-time data. The dispatcher can monitor the dynamics and distribution of consumption of all resources by individual sections on the monitor screen, and control the operability of each system. For example, a leak or a rupture in a pipeline will be instantly recognized by the MULTICAL® heat meter as an excess of the permissible difference in the volumes of the coolant in the supply and return pipelines. The device immediately signals this to the control panel. The controller closes the valve, stopping the supply of coolant to the «dangerous» section of the heating system. «Any leak or accident will be immediately detected and eliminated as soon as possible,» note the ARMO-GROUP engineers. «Considering that the apartments in the Federation Tower are classified as elite real estate and will have a very expensive finish, this is especially important.»
Only a few people can manage a huge building. The control room is connected to an uninterruptible power supply system, it performs its work in any situations that may arise in the tower, — says Pavel Peka, an expert of the Federation project on power supply and automation. To increase reliability, the project provides for the presence of two simultaneously operating control rooms: if one of them fails for some reason, the second will continue to manage all processes.
The real effect of the use of high-tech «smart home» solutions in the Federation tower can only be assessed after its commissioning. However, it can already be assumed that the implementation of this project will set a new bar for energy efficiency and automation for all Russian business construction for many years to come.
Press service of Kamstrup