Cylon is on a mission at EADS Astrium

Precise environmental control for the production of £multi-million satellites at EADS Astrium is controlled by a Cylon BMS — along with lighting, ventilation, air conditioning and heating throughout the entire site. The production of satellites requires the use of numerous clean rooms, and the air quality, temperature and humidity within them are precisely controlled to protect sensitive satellites from contamination. Air in the clean rooms is repeatedly filtered to remove dust particles and other impurities that could damage production. Alan Juggins, facilities manager for the site, says, ‘Cylon provides the absolute reliability that we need to ensure the precise monitoring and control of our site, which is required when you manufacture multi-million-pound satellites. Temperature in the clean rooms is maintained within ±3 K and relative humidity within ±10%. If either go out of range, an alarm is sent to the front-end supervisor. Critical alarms such as compressor or boiler failure are relayed immediately to the security-lodge PC. The installation is monitored 24 h a day; in the event of plant failure, an emergency response engineer can be called out to attend site if deemed necessary. The Cylon BMS controls the Mitsubishi air conditioning in offices and throughout the site via a Modbus interface. Because of the size of the site, there are two 8-port hubs. There is also a Modbus interface to Airedale air-conditioning units. Lighting in large clean rooms, external feature lighting and general lighting are also controlled by the BMS. The light switches, when pressed, send a start signal to the BMS. If the time schedule is in occupied mode, the lights will come on and go off at the end of the occupancy — otherwise the lights will come on as an extension to the time period. Some buildings have photocells monitoring light levels, both inside and outside, so that lighting levels can be maintained automatically when needed and not left on or switched unnecessarily through unoccupied time periods. The Cylon system also manages alarms. The duty engineer has a laptop for out-of-hours monitoring. This remote service is also established at the offices of System 4 Services if further assistance and maintenance services are required.