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User Solutions
Open System Provides Precise Temperature Control
System integrator Af nity Energy worked with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to design and install a new temperature control system for their research chambers.
By Allan Evora, President of Affinity Energy
The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill was spending too much time and money support- ing an existing control system. That's unacceptable for UNC Chapel Hill, which has nearly $1 billion in annual research expenditures and ranks eighth in research activity among public and private universities
Figure 1: (courtesy of Af nity Energy) According to its website, UNC-Chap- el Hill is the nation's rst public university, opening its doors to students in 1795, and is known for its innovative teaching, research and public service.
Obsolete Control System Hardware
Many of the research chambers at UNC were installed more than 20-years ago, and it was becom- ing difficult to find parts for the controllers used to con- trol temperature and other variables (Figure 2). During maintenance of one particular chamber, the UNC staff couldn't find a supplier to repair a malfunctioning tem- perature controller. This maintainability concern was recognized as a possible campus-wide issue since many of the chambers were put into service at about the same time.
In addition, needs were expanding, with research-
ers requesting tighter, more accurate temperature and
humidity control, and the ability to view temperatures
in real time. None of these requests were possible with
the old control and monitoring systems. Investigation
showed it would be too expensive to upgrade the exist-
ing proprietary systems, so the university sought a more
affordable and flexible solution.
Afterspeakingwithmanysystemintegratorswanting Figure2:(courtesyofAf nityEnergy)Theoriginalchambercontrol
in the United States (Figure 1).
Much of this research is done in about 1,000 cold,
warm and freezer chambers located around campus. Some chambers store millions of dollars of products, while others are used to perform critical research in life science. In many cases, the chamber temperature must be controlled accurately to within half a degree due to the controlled experiments conducted within.
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to employ proprietary programming technology, UNC
system was more than 20-years old and dif cult to support, and an up- grade by the original manufacturer would be have been too expensive.
continued >>
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