number 015. November / december 2015
CONTENTS published CARTIF Research Centre Boecillo Technology Park. Valladolid, Spain www.cartif.com
staff CARTIF Communication Department
collaborations Energy Division
CARTIF news
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Keywords
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The project
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Events
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design www.typopotamo.com
photography CARTIF archive. Imagination at work, Cascade Steel Cover and back cover picture: Typop贸tamo
ICTs FOR EN
EDITOR’S NOTE
As the COP 21 in Paris and the fight against climate change have hit the headlines and taken over most of the information space during the last month of the year, we find especially interesting to talk about the various technological solutions already existent on the market that offer a clean way of saving energy. For several decades, researchers, technologists and scientists have been devoting their efforts to giving an answer to an apparently irreversible situation. In a time when some are asking themselves whether the advancement of production technologies is the source of the many existing environmental wrongs, those who work on R&D prefer looking for other technologies to help improve the situation. If terms such as “energy efficiency”, “emission reduction” and “circular economy” are already part of the everyday vocabulary of half the world population, they will soon become usual expressions in other sectors of the population such as the one we analyze in this issue of CARTIF NEWSVIEW. Building Energy Management System (best known as BEMS) is a system of energy management that will transform the way we consume energy in buildings, responsible of more than 25% of the national total energy consumption; a system that is being tested and applied, even though it is still being improved through research projects. In this issue, we depict the system and explain how it can help us.
NERGY EFFICIENCY
cartif news
cartif news This news selection is just a small sample of the Center activities in the last months. You can follow us through our web and social networks. THE MANAGEMENT OF SOLID WASTE ARRIVES AT THE MOST REMOTE EUROPEAN AREAS This is the main goal of the new CARTIF LIFE project, PAVEtheWAYSTE, which aims to facilitate the implementation of the Waste Framework Directive in remote areas, allowing local and regional authorities improve municipal performance in the field of waste recycling. This will be achieved through an economically viable solid waste plan, based on the demonstration of an innovative system for the separation of municipal solid waste (MSW) in origin be drawn. This system will be able to order and treat different types of recyclable materials and organic waste in order to retrieve the final products of high quality and purity directly.
LIFE BATTLE CO2: USING BIOMASS AS FUEL IN THE PRODUCTION OF ASPHALT This new LIFE project, coordinated by CARTIF, goes a step further in its research line on sustainable asphalts. The BATTLE CO2 project proposes to incorporate biomass as an alternative fuel in the manufacturing processes of asphalt mixtures. As final results of the project is expected to achieve a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases in the manufacturing stage around 80%. Besides the development of protocols for the creation of Product Category Rules for a new category of Environmental Product Declaration “EPD� according to the criteria of the ISO 14025.
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cartif news
OPTIRAIL PROJECT FINAL CONCLUSIONS After three years this European project has developed a Smart Framework for maintenance management to facilitate making effective and efficient decision in maintenance of railway networks within corridors across Europe. A new knowledge based tool focused on Fuzzy and Computational Intelligence techniques has been developed and validated in two case studies. This tool combines a top-down approach, from standards and regulations to interventions planning on the railways, with a bottom-up approach, from interventions to be carried out to standards and regulations.
CARTIF LAUNCHES A NEW PROJECT TO IMPROVE THE REFURBISHMENT AT DISTRICT LEVEL This new project aims to develop an Optimised Energy Efficient Design Platform for refurbishment at district level, which will deliver an optimised, integrated and systemic design based on an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) approach for building and district retrofitting projects, reducing time delivery and uncertainties, resulting in improved solutions when compared to business-as-usual practices. OptEEmAL will contribute to the overall challenge related to the design of energy/resource efficient retrofitted buildings and districts (including those with historical value), particularly in three main identified targets: a multi-scale cross-disciplinary approach fostering interactions among players, offering an optimised design for affordable sustainability framework platform that supports refurbished construction projects which minimise building GHG emissions.
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cartif news
LACTIC ACID CAN IMPROVE FOOTWEAR PROPERTIES Providing a beneficial health properties: a smoother and more resistant skin, thanks to its regenerative power, moisturizing and softening. This is the aim of LACTISHOE project, which will work over the next two years in a new range of products for footwear (insoles and lining) with beneficial properties for the foot by incorporating lactic acid microencapsulated. To achieve this, an hybrid membranefermentation reactor will be developed for producing lactic acid with high yield and purity. Then, it will perform the lactic acid microencapsulation, and then it will be incorporated in the templates and in the lining of shoes.
REMOURBAN, ONE OF THE SCC EUROPE’S FLAGSHIP PROJECTS IN THE URBAN FUTURES CONFERENCE Fraunhofer’s “Urban Futures” Conference, which was held in Berlin last November, aimed to bring together relevant stakeholders in Germany and Europe who specialize in sustainable urban development and the smart cities of tomorrow. Visionaries from municipalities, politics, business and research will show what is set to become standard in the next five or ten years through combinations of community strategies for the future, urban technologies, new forms of collaboration and the use of city neighborhoods as living labs. And for the first time, the experience gained so far from the three European smart city projects will be presented for evaluation and analysis.
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cartif news
EASME INVITES CARTIF TO SHARE ITS LIFE PROJECTS MANAGEMENT EXPERIENCE The Executive Agency for SMEs organized last 29 October the official launch meeting of all projects approved in 2014 LIFE call. CARTIF, which comes to this day as LIFE BATTLE CO2 project coordinator, has been invited to give a talk about the main challenges of a LIFE projects coordinator, thanks to the experience acquired by researchers through the 12 projects on going, eight of them as coordinators. Alberto Moral, BATTLE CO2 project coordinator, will be responsible for addressing the public, among which are responsible of Unit LIFE & CIP EcoInnovation European Commission, LIFE projects agents monitoring and projects coordinators of the 2014 call.
REEMAIN, A BENCHMARK OF FACTORIES OF THE FUTURE IN COLOMBIA The project coordinator, Aníbal Reñones, traveled to the South American country to share project’s advances with entrepreneurs, supplies of energy technology, and teachers and students from the ITM. REEMAIN’s overall purpose is to deliver innovative solutions for efficiency in the use of resources and renewable energy within manufacturing, using extensive knowledge from production processes, energy simulation, resource planning and energy storage.
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keywords
keywords building refurbishment saving
energy efficiency control energy management BEMS
Currently, energetic refurbishment of buildings has become a necessity that yields great social, economic and environmental benefits. Optimization of energy favors comfort of buildings, produces economic savings as a result of reducing consumption and, by all means, has a lower impact on the environment. Given the opportunities offered by the current situation in matters of refurbishment and the building stock with a high margin for improvement and notable necessities, it is essential to search for advanced, reliable and intelligent solutions that allow an important increase of the energy efficiency percentage in the following years.
BEMS’ main goal is to turn a passive building into an active and interactive building Most of the buildings in Spain and Europe do not meet the requirements that the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) establishes, the main European regulations intended to guarantee the compliance of the objectives of the European Union concerning the containment of greenhouse gas emissions, consumption and energy efficiency and the generation of energy from renewable resources. These requirements may be different depending
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on the use that the building receives or whether it concerns a new building or one that already exists. In one way or another, they follow the same goal. One of the main goals of this Directive is the renovation of 3% of the central government buildings and their corresponding refurbishment strategy. Besides, 60% of the Spanish houses, responsible for 24% of the national total energy consumption, were built before 1980, which means that they show deficiencies and limited measures meant for efficiency. Energy consumption represents between 20% and 30% of the operation costs of a building and, in turn, these mean 75% of the life-cycle cost of the building.
BEMS is a complex intelligent system, complete based on costs
In the current market, there are some energy management systems that offer various functionalities, such as energy monitoring, the generation of reports about consumption or the management of the energy efficiency projects. These solutions are available for a wide variety of application areas: residential, building complexes, mining, trade, industry, service sector, street lighting, electric cars, Smart Grid, Smart Cities and energetic agents.
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However, not every solution offers an intelligent control based on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), those values processed and collected from the monitored data which allow evaluating the performance and functioning of the system. Currently, a BEMS system (Building Energy Management System) is being worked on, with the objective of improving these commercial procedures and knowing those evaluation values, offering new functionalities that are not available on the market yet. The BEMS system is a complex intelligent system, multilevel, multipurpose, integrated and complete based on costs, which performs in buildings monitoring and controlling the electric and mechanic equipments, among which the most important are lighting, air conditioning and security systems. Its purpose is to turn a passive building into an active and interactive building. BEMS systems are becoming increasingly more present in buildings for the management of energy services, and they can produce up to 40% in energy savings in the building. These systems take into account the multiple possible solutions towards a higher efficiency, and they permit a higher decision-making capacity.
generation. Applying the BEMS, one can control every active component in a building to optimize air conditioning and lighting; improve the residents’ or the visitors’ comfort and achieve notable energy savings.” The BEMS work process starts with the monitoring network, which gathers the information from the energy consumption and comfort. In this network, the action devices allow implementing the various control strategies. On the other hand, the electric and thermal consumption in the different systems is also gathered so it shows the necessities and the expense in each of the different rooms in the building. Finally, combining the information with the thermal and electric total consumptions in the building as a whole helps to obtain the historic behavior, as well as the momentary values on which decision-making is based, taking into account the user’s comfort at all times.
CARTIF has years of experience in the application of this technology, which has taken part in numerous projects. One of the latest is the European project BRESAER, whose main objective is developing and demonstrating an industrialized envelope system, innovative, efficient and adaptable for building refurbishment, including pre-fabricated solutions, active and passive in a combined manner, and even integrated in a lightweight structural mesh. José Luis Hernández, researcher in the Energy Division of CARTIF, claims that “the four basic functions in a BEMS system are: monitoring, control, optimization and processed document
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The BEMS system also holds the concept of the Internet of Things, as it allows harmonizing all the measures in a common model, so as to facilitate the control and comprehension of those data. An example of this integration is another of the projects that CARTIF has coordinated in recent years: BaaS. In this case, as Susana Martín, the researcher from the Energy Division in CARTIF explains, “we have developed a middleware that has access to the information related with a building (sensor and automation networks, weather station and BIM – Building Information Modelling –). This middleware offers all available data in a homogeneous way to companies responsible for the building energy management. In terms of ‘cloud,’” Martín adds, “BaaS establishes a new concept: Building as a Service, as the middleware offers access to the information of the building in a transparent manner.”
BEMS allows reducing up to 70% of the primary energy consumption Thus far, the advantages from the application of a BEMS system, especially in terms of energy savings, have been applied in residential buildings. However, there is a large stock of historic buildings in Europe which were built without having in mind energy efficiency aspects, and they show numerous restrictions at the time of the refurbishment because “intrusive” solutions cannot be included (such as thermal insulation). In these cases, the application of ICTs is decisive
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to achieve the same results without damaging the aesthetic value of the building. 3ENCULT, another project that the group of researchers at CARTIF has been working on, developed a specific BEMS to apply to the historic and heritage stock. In this case, the BEMS calculates the measure of a non-intrusive, wireless and energy-saving monitoring system. Besides, the BEMS takes into account the restrictions of this kind of buildings (for example, maintaining the temperature and humidity in a room) and incorporates these parameters to its KPIs. The case study that CARTIF worked on was the refurbishment of the School of Engineering of BĂŠjar (Salamanca, Spain) (1), where the system focused on lighting control and the improvement of thermal comfort. The obtained results show savings of up to 50% of the electric consumption, something that presents an interesting scope of application in this sector.
Benefits of the implementation of the system After all the observations hitherto, it is certain that the application of the BEMS system, along with the implementation of passive solutions, allows reducing up to 70% of the primary energy consumption. This fact, together with the increase in the comfort of the building’s user, either with public or private use, makes the implementation of ICTS to the management of energy efficiency a solution that will be applied to the second-hand and new housing stock in the following years. A useful tool, progressively easier to that in the future will let the resident or of the building have absolute control the management of energy resources technology offers.
use, user over that
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the project
the project CALYPSO: predictive maintenance in wire rod production A wire rolling mill or wire rod mill is a complex type of installation in the steel industry that enables the extraction of steel in bars through hot rolling process. Some defects may appear on its surface during the manufacturing process. Detecting those defects is essential to guarantee the quality of the final product. The objective of the Calypso project has been to develop and implement an algorithm to classify the defects found in this process through non-destructive testing, eddy currents, specifically. Classification is arranged without any previous knowledge about the kind of defects that may appear.
CALYPSO would allow the steel mills to save costs resulting from the destruction of the faulty product Wire rod is manufactured from ingots, called billets, obtained from molten scrap metal. Billets are heated up until they reach about 900ยบC, when they turn malleable before smelting completely. At this stage, billets are processed through a rolling mill, being carried through roller sets whose separation gets increasingly narrower. In this way, billets become thinner and longer. At the final stage of the process, we obtain wire rolls of
A wire rolling mill in wire rod production
Wire rod production
Final product Source: Cascade Steel
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the project
several kilometers in length and a diameter in the order of one centimeter. The associates of this project, co-funded by MINECO, were CARTIF and the company Isend. Precisely, Isend is one of the few global manufacturers that have developed the necessary technology to detect those defects under the hard manufacturing conditions of wire rod. The gauges must tolerate a temperature of about 900ยบC and must be capable of detecting defects at the speed of the wire rod, which can reach up to 100m/s. Besides detection, the classification of the defects found is of great importance. There are many classes of defects, each one of different gravity, and the technology in use does not allow distinguishing between one or another, this is, it does not allow classifying. This compels us to dispose of the entire wire rod that shows a small defect. If it were possible to classify defects, faulty production could be allocated for those applications that authorize the presence of defects from the detected class. This would allow the steel mills to save costs resulting from the destruction of the faulty product. To solve this problem, CARTIF has developed an algorithm that classifies the defects found by the equipment from Isend. The greatest difficulty to develop this algorithm was the lack of information about the number of classes of defects, and the ignorance about the aspect of the signals that the gauges from Isend generated when they detected defects belonging to each of the classes. The strategy followed is based on unsupervised classification, which enables the possibility to discover the different classes of defects. The key to success is the right estimation of a distance
Wire rod defects
that allows measuring the degree of similarity between the different types of defects. The algorithm has been tested with control data obtained from a rolling mill and 84% of the defects have already been classified correctly. This means an important progress regarding the current technology. The success obtained shows how promising these techniques are, when classifying defects in a state of lack of information about the possible types of existing defects. However, to reach industrial exploitation, it is necessary to develop previously a widespread testing campaign to validate the algorithm in any potential situation. This will be the next step in the investigation.
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events
events
winter 2015
nov. 30 / dic. 11
december 2
Sttutgart (Germany)
Hyderabad (India)
UN climate change conference. COP21
Women4Energy
IBPSA 2015, Building Simulation Conference
ParĂs (France)
+ INFO
+ INFO
+ INFO
february 2 / 3
february 18 / 19
march 8 / 11
BUDMA. International Construction and Architecture Fair
BIM European Summit
Sustainable Built Environment (SBE)
Poznan (Polland)
+ INFO
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december 7 / 9
Barcelona (Spain) + INFO
Hamburg (Germany)
+ INFO