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BASautomation Product Line Helps to Advance Buildings' Rating

Contemporary Controls is proud to play an integral part in the Building Management System (BMS) of the Henderson 688 project in Shanghai, PRC. The BMS of the Henderson project contains a swath of various technologies with Contemporary Controls devices playing key parts in the system. Contemporary Controls has more than 51 BASrouters and numerous Skorpion 8 and 16-port 10/100 Mbps Ethernet switches from our BASautomation and CTRLink line of products in the buildings' BMS.

Henderson 688 is a "BEAM Plus" platinum award winning building. Square footage consists of 60,627 m2 of office space and 4,500 m2 of retail space. The high-end office building caters to international tenants and has 24 floors above ground and 3 floors below. (BEAM sets a standard in sustainable building design by measuring a building's environmental performance. Research shows buildings with a BEAM Plus Platinum rating on average consume 30% less energy than baseline values compared to their predecessors. Statistics also show a decrease in operating costs by 13.6% for new green construction. Designers, clients and others are encouraged to think about low carbon and low impact design strategies when designing buildings, minimizing the energy demands created by a building before taking energy efficiency and low carbon technologies into consideration).

A BMS was installed in the building with the intent to accommodate future expansion plans. The System Integrator chose Contemporary Controls due to product dependability and wealth of experience serving the building automation industry with devices that support the BACnet open standard protocol. The property owner had a specific task in mind, which was to make sure that the newly installed BMS ran properly and was cost-effective. Just as important, the BMS had to stand up to the demanding needs of the buildings temperature fluctuations, no easy task considering the buildings envelope consisted mostly of glass.

The installed BMS includes a Honeywell Webs system with a Niagara AX Supervisor, 4 JACE-600 building controllers and 1900 Spyder VAV and unitary controllers. The building occupies over 1800 VAV controllers with 75 VAV controllers per floor. Each MS/TP segment consists of 28-48 Spyders and one Contemporary Controls' BASrouter. Fifty-one Contemporary Controls' BASrouters are used to interconnect the Spyder BACnet MS/TP communication ports to BACnet/IP ports on the JACEs. The BASrouters off-load the MS/TP communications burden from the JACE and by doing so reduce the quantity of JACEs needed for supervising the Spyder controllers reduced device quantities results in cost-savings. Ethernet communication is handled by Contemporary Controls' CTRLink line of Skorpion 8 and 16-port 10/100 Mbps Ethernet switches.

The BASrouter provides stand-alone routing between BACnet networks such as BACnet/IP, BACnet Ethernet, and BACnet MS/TP-thereby allowing the system integrator to mix BACnet network technologies within a single BACnet internetwork. There are two physical communication ports on the BASrouter. One is a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port and the other an isolated MS/TP port. Configuration is accomplished via a web page.

For control panels where DIN-rail space is at a premium, the Skorpion series of plug-and-play Ethernet switches with widths as little as one inch is the answer. Housed in a rugged metal enclosure with a metal DIN-rail clip, the Skorpion series includes models with 5, 8 and 16 ports. Some models provide one or two ports of either single-mode or multimode fiber optics with either SC or ST connectors. No configuration is necessary. All copper ports automatically configure their data rate and duplex using the auto-negotiation protocol. Depending on the capability of the link partner, communication is established at either 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps, and in the case of the GT models at 1000 Mbps, and at either half- or full-duplex.

Using a BACnet/IP backbone of wired and wireless Ethernet, Contemporary Controls offers a complete and economical BMS solution.

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