Control Systems for District Heating
Hoval AG
Intelligent communication centre based on pure web technology
The Hoval AG, based in Liechtenstein, is an expert in indoor climate technology. The range of Hoval includes integrated solutions in heating and cooling systems. Hoval products are offered in more than 50 countries and references can be found among others in the Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and the Vatican. In 2011 Hoval expanded its offering towards local and district heating. With its range, the company is addressing energy suppliers, public utilities and cooperatives. The focus is not only on small and medium sized, decentralized systems, but also on large plants and entire city supplies. The performance levels of the district heating transfer stations are 15 kW for single-family homes and up to 20 MW for large office buildings or industrial plants.
In the course of the portfolio enlargement various control systems were tested. The result was against an inhouse-development and finaly for the product line "atvise" from Bachmann Visutec GmbH. The reason for selecting this HMI / SCADA solution was, that it was the only available solution on the market that was based on pure Web technology and OPC UA, and therefore fulfilled the requirement of open standards. The option of using a standard Web browser for visualization makes client installations, including maintenance obsolete. In addition, the modern browser technology solves a variety of requirements, for example, the automatic scaling on the respective end device. Furthermore "atvise" offers the possibility of a complete applicational and visual customization. This was necessary in order to fullfill the project requirements.
Especially important in the project implementation was a fast know-how transfer to ensure the shortest possible duration of the project. This represented an additional challenge as Hoval is an international company with distributed suppliers that needed to be integrated into the regular transfer of knowledge. Since the implementation, more than 3,000 systems, respectively controllers, were visualized with the atvise software. The languages supported are German, English, French and Italian.
The project includes approximately 1.2 million data points and a daily historisation of up to 15 million data point information, which have to be handled successfully. For the engineering the "on the fly" generation of visualization was considered particularly valuable. Despite the high volumes of data, each station adjusts automatically and therefore reduced a great amount of configuration work. Overall, the project implementation with atvise solution is not just a necessary supplement, but certainly an enrichment of the existing Hoval portfolio.
