Tor Vergata Hospital

The Tor Vergata Hospital, located in Rome, is an imposing hospital complex, which covers an area of about 140,000 square metres and consists of a central body of four horizontal levels and two towers with eleven floors.
The facility hosts 1,700 employees and thousands of patients and visitors every day.

Needs

In order to meet the need to increase consumption efficiency by 30% in three years, CPL chose to install a system at the hospital that would guarantee not only extensive financial savings, but also the possibility of improving the maintenance performance of mechanical systems by allowing for the checking of the status of equipment in real time, and providing an efficient management tool for ambient comfort, through the control of all the technological systems used for energy production, distribution and monitoring of ambient conditions.

Solutions

The project implemented by CPL involved the installation of a hardware and software architecture, based on the Niagara N4 framework, for the intelligent management of the building with a single central server, located in the Hospital’s Control Room, which allows the centralisation of data from individual controllers. The system provides integrated management of all the equipment involved in the production and distribution of heating and cooling energy and monitoring of ambient data (temperature and humidity). The system is perfectly expandable both within the single automation and acquisition framework and at a central level, allowing the implementation of functions that are useful for the BEMS. The use of standard protocols for Building Automation, such as BACnet® IP, Modbus TCP, Meter Bus, allows integration with data from different controllers and suppliers, and it is possible to export data from the remote monitoring system to other Artificial Intelligence systems or Information Systems with open databases.
With this project, CPL has made it possible for the hospital to have a single management system for the cooling plant, the central heating plant (hot and superheated water), the co-generation plant, as well as the control of more than 120 air handling units for rooms such as wards and common areas, and of all the distribution sub-stations for heating, cooling, steam, superheated and hot water lines. The results achieved and the consumption trends are easily verifiable thanks to the system integration of meters for heating energy, cooling energy, hot water lines, steam, monitoring of electricity consumption in stations and refrigeration units. Lastly, access to logging and storage of data useful for analysis of performance and system efficiency is fundamental.

Advantages

The Building Energy Management System (BEMS) allows for the upgrading of the energy production and distribution system to demand by performing measurement, monitoring, diagnostic and control functions in order to achieve the energy performance levels and savings planned for under certain environmental conditions.
It was found that there was a need to constantly analyse the energy and system data (continuous commissioning) through the use of automation and control systems. The project has resulted in considerable savings on gas and electricity.