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Danfoss

Drives for fans in commercial buildings

Optimize comfort and energy consumption in building ventilation

With user-friendly interfaces, distributed intelligence and reduced power consumption, Danfoss AC drives optimize the performance of fans.

The VLT® HVAC Drive and VLT® Refrigeration Drive convert velocity pressure sensor values into flow values, enabling setup based on fixed flow or fixed differential flow. This optimizes both comfort and energy consumption. To improve comfort levels even further, drives connected to fans can be set to avoid the frequency bands which create resonance and damage in the ventilation system.

  • Extended building management system capacity

    When integrated into a building management system network, to extend the capacity of the controller, all HVAC drive I/O points are available as remote I/Os. For example, room temperature sensors (Pt1000/Ni1000) can be directly connected to the system. 

  • Improved air-handling performance

    The VLT® HVAC Drive and VLT® Refrigeration Drive are fitted with a built-in Smart Logic Controller and four auto-tune PID controllers to control air-handling functions with fans, valves and dampers. The direct digital controllers of the building management system are released and valuable data points are saved lowering air-handling costs. The VLT® HVAC Drive handles logical rules and input from sensors, real-time functionality, and time-related actions. This enables the AC drive to better control a wide range of functions:

    • Weekend and working day schedules
    • Cascaded P-PI for temperature control
    • Flow balancing between fresh and outlet air
    • Belt monitoring – from the relation between current and speed, the AC drive is able to reliably recognize a broken belt. Lack of air flow is detected immediately so that action can be taken to reduce costs and downtime 

  • Protect applications and operators 

    The VLT® HVAC Drive FC 102 provides the STO (Safe Torque Off) function in compliance with ISO 13849-1 PL d and SIL 2, according to IEC 61508 / IEC 62061. In high demand applications, this can be expanded with the VLT® Safe Option MCB 140, an external module that provides functions such as Safe Stop 1 (SS1), Safely Limited Speed (SLS) and Safe Maximum Speed (SMS), control of external contactors and safety door monitoring and unlocking.

  • Reliable harmonic mitigation

    While AC drives increase precision, save energy and extend application lifetime, they also introduce harmonic currents to the hospital grid. If not kept under control, harmonic currents can affect the performance and reliability of generators and other equipment.

    To ensure minimal disturbance, read more about our harmonics application know how, software tools and harmonic mitigation solutions.

Air quality in the pharmaceutical industry

In the pharmaceutical industry air-quality is a concern to support employee health and safety and prevent cross-contamination. Using  Danfoss AC Drives to control dust collector fan speed is an efficient way to maintain airflow/static pressure while increasing energy savings. Reducing fan speeds by 20% can translate to 50% energy savings.

Pharmacy processing clean room applications have unique requirements, Danfoss AC Drives can help control the chilled and the hot water valves of machinery to ensure conditions are met accurately. 

Air quality and clean rooms

Safety in hospital ventilation

Hospital ventilation has strict requirements regarding safety, compliance and efficiency. Danfoss provides AC-drive solutions for fire and smoke safety, heat dissipation, harmonic mitigation, and EMC and seismic compliance.

Fail safe with no trips

In hospitals, failure for any reason can jeopardize lives. Drives powering pumps and chillers must be extremely reliable and virtually immune to mains supply disruptions. To achieve this reliability, Danfoss AC drives are designed to ignore voltage sags and even short outages, maintaining full performance at all times.

Safety in hospital ventilation

Airport ventilation

With hundreds of thousands or even millions of passengers annually, ventilation is a top priority for international airports. To improve traveler comfort and safety, and to combat rising electricity prices, drives are increasingly being used to control and optimize the operation of air-handling units and reduce energy consumption.

VLT HVAC Drives extend from low- to high-power solutions. They come equipped with HVAC-dedicated functionalities and compatible soft starters and filters for EMC and harmonics mitigation. And the complete range of fieldbus communications options enables effective integration with the building automation system.

Airport ventilation

Tunnel ventilation

Metro and motorway tunnel operators demand strict ventilation performance for safe operation and optimized cost of ownership. The VLT HVAC Drive offerings, from low to high power, fulfill smoke and fire safety requirements and comply with seismic regulations. All our units offer the same HVAC-dedicated functionalities, standards compliance and compatible soft starters, filter and fieldbus communications options.

Tunnel ventilation

EC+ Concept

When building an HVAC system, to get the highest performance and system efficiency, the individual components – motor, drive and fan – need to be flexible and broadly compatible with each other. For instance, if you specify a high-efficiency motor that is only compatible with lower efficiency fans, the overall system efficiency would suffer and would not reflect the high performance – and investment – in the individual components.

Danfoss Drives’ EC+ concept allows ventilation system designers to combine a VLT® HVAC Drive with the most efficient fan and permanent magnet motor.

Advantages of the EC+ concept

  • Free choice of motor technology: PM, asynchronous or synchronous reluctance with the same AC drive 
  • Device installation and operation remain unchanged
  • Manufacturer independence in the choice of all components
  • Superior system efficiency thanks to a combination of individual components with optimum efficiency
  • Retrofitting of existing systems is possible
  • Wide range of rated powers for standard, PM and synchronous reluctance motors

 

Healthcare Data Center Takes Control of Uptime and Energy with Danfoss VLT® Drives

Physicians and clinicians often need access to medical data in real time — just a few minutes of downtime is unacceptable. The data center industry has created standards to define the level of uptime required for a given class of application and the infrastructure needed to maintain that level. The standard being applied to medical data centers — known as the Uptime Institute’s Tier III standard — calls for 99.982 percent uptime, which translates to no more than 1.6 hours of downtime per year. This standard requires an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system that can handle a power outage of at least 72 hours. 

Healthcare Data Center Controls Uptime and Energy

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