Trane Control Systems improves chiller control to save energy

18 February, 2006

By augmenting BMS control of chillers with more detailed information, Trane’s Trace Summit control system can achieve significant energy savings.

The Tracer Summit control system for chillers from Trane Control Systems is said to achieve significant energy savings, even when the chillers are controlled through a conventional building-management system. In an installation with three 950 kW chillers, a Tracer Summit system supplementing a BMS reduced running loads from 52.8% to 25.2%, while maintaining set flow temperatures. The key to these savings is the ability of Tracer Summit to obtain more detailed information from chillers than traditional control systems, which is used to devise a control strategy tailored to each installation. A key control strategy is to minimise energy-wasting stops and starts. Each start/stop is estimated to reduce the life of a chiller by eight minutes. Soft start/stop also reduce mechanical wear. Tracer Summit is built on open protocols, including BACnet and LonTalk.

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