Cal-Comp USA 3D Printing Lab HVAC Controls

When Cal-Comp USA started making plans to move into their new electronics manufacturing facility in Carlsbad, California, the plans called for a state of the art 3D print laboratory and showroom.  This laboratory would consist of four climate controlled zone in which various 3D printing technologies would be implemented, included FMD, SLA, DLP, SLS, and SLM equipment.

CGK Consulting Group in coordination with Techne Control Systems designed and installed a 100% outside air HVAC system with dehumidification, humidification, local electric reheat, and negative pressure control exhaust fan.  The system consisted of an AAON packaged unit with WattMaster VCXX2 controller, a variable frequency exhaust fan with Yaskawa Z-1000 VFD, a dual unit Nortec humidifier, Marley electric re-heat coils, and various BACnet communicating sensors for temperature, humidity, and pressure control.

CGK Consulting Group’s MEP and Controls engineering department collaborated on equipment and controls specifications to developed an integrated Building Automation System (BAS) architecture to provide centralized control over each zone in the system.  This architecture exclusively makes use of the ASHRAE BACnet protocol over MS/TP to control and coordinate all system devices from a centralize controller.  A small segement of TCP/IP over Ethernet was installed for integrating the BAS controller to the in-wall flush mounted touch screen display.

Techne Control Systems, the control implementation subsidiary of CGK Consulting Group, designed, built, and installed a custom control panel centered around a Lynxspring JENEsys^® Edge™ 534 running the Tridium Niagara 4 framework.  Control programming and human machine interface development was performed off-site at Techne Control Systems development lab and then installed ready for commissioning at the Cal-Comp USA site.  Due to the coordinated and parallel efforts of CGK Consulting Group, Techne Control Systems, and REM Mechanical, the building automation system was ready to be commissioned at the time the last mechanical and electrical tie-ins were completed.

The flush-mounted HMI touch-panel LCD monitor is mounted at the end of the main hallway.  From this station, the facilities manager can monitor and override any of the system equipment.  For simplicity, the default view is the plan view, which allows the operator to easily and intuitively adjust temperature setpoints for each zone with the touch of a finger.

For commissioning, troubleshooting, and detailed system information, the HMI elevation view can be used to monitor the process conditions and equipment status of every device in the building automation system.   Each major equipment item also has a detailed status and control screen, allowing the facilities manager to manually override the program control functions from the local interface panel.