Emerson’s Helix will be home to home
2nd June 2015
USA: Emerson Climate Technologies is to include a 2,000ft², two-storey home within its Helix research centre being built at the University of Dayton.
Emerson says the “home inside a building” will serve as a working laboratory, enabling faster testing of the company’s future innovations in comfort, energy savings and connected home concepts. The residential connected home module, which will feature ambient controls to simulate a range of below-freezing to hot, humid weather conditions, is being constructed by Emerson as one of five modules within The Helix innovation centre on the University of Dayton campus.
“We will be evaluating comfort and energy savings from every angle,” said Hung Pham, director of integrated technologies at Emerson Climate Technologies Air Conditioning business. “This home module in the Helix will allow us to change refrigerant, hvac systems, airflow and weather to help evaluate impact on human comfort and health from the standpoint of air conditioning, heating, indoor air quality, humidity, noise, lighting and other factors.”
Emerson’s residential module will be a fully functioning and furnished home with technologies and instrumentation in place to research the comfort and energy savings performance of these systems as well as connected home technologies. Emerson’s residential connected home module will contain various heating and air conditioning system types, with the ability to be easily adapted to test others. To support work on efficiency improvements, the home and hvac systems will have separate meters to measure energy consumption.
The residential connected home is one of five modules currently under construction at the $35m Helix innovation centre, a 40,000ft² facility on the University of Dayton campus. When finished, the Helix will employ about 35 people and focus on five hvacr industry markets: supermarket refrigeration, food service operations, residential connected homes, data centre cooling and light commercial buildings.
The Helix, which Emerson is planning to make a global hub of hvacr industry education, is expected to be completed late this year with a formal opening in spring 2016. In addition to the five modules, the facility includes three learning labs and the company plans to host industry meetings and hold forums for hvacr professionals on-site.
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