INNER HARBOR WITH OUTER EFFECT

Best grades before and after the beginning of construction: The H2Office has been awarded gold certification by the German Sustainable Building Council (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen e. V.). As the newest building in the newly designed Duisburg inner harbor, it is one of the city’s most exclusive business locations. In addition to its desirable location and prestigious facade, it is modern automation that assures the tenants a comfortable atmosphere. At the core of this, are industrial PCs, controllers and bus modules provided by WAGO of Minden.

The city of Duisburg is well-known within and outside of Germany for one thing: its Ruhr Valley charm, for its furnaces and coke ovens, for coal, iron and steel. And although Duisburg has become one of the best-known European locations for the steel industry, the city has long relied on more than this single economic pillar. It has enhanced itself on a grand scale – a process that is by no means complete. With large city planning projects such as the “Duisburger Freiheit,” the waterfront or the Mercator Quarter, Duisburg is undergoing a structural transformation.
Within a series of noteworthy city development measures, a project with especially great outer effect must be mentioned. According to the master plan of London architect, Sir Norman Foster, the Duisburg inner harbor has transformed itself. No longer an outdated trading post, it is a modern location for culture, living, business and gastronomy. The design was finished in early 2010 upon the completion of the second section of the H2Office building. In addition to restaurants and commercial spaces, the H2O GmbH & Co. KG offers tenants a total of 10,500 square meters of prestigious and exclusive office spaces.

Flexibility in space usage
The exclusivity of office spaces is not due entirely to being tucked away behind a futuristic facade or because they are flexibly rented with respect to size. Rather, it’s because the H2Office - even before the start of construction - was presented with gold pre-certification for its environmentally friendly, economical and user-friendly construction by the German Sustainable Building Council. “For us as the executing company, the pre-certification was a great incentive; for now the trick was to justify the advance laurels with optimized building technology,” summarizes Christian Hay, project manager at RaumComputer Entwicklungs- und Vetriebs GmbH. Together with Lanfer Automation, RaumComputer installed all of the measurement, control and monitoring technology in Duisburg – from primary systems to room automation.
That which seems routine at first glance was anything but routine during construction. The planners and construction manager wanted to set new standards with the H2Office – and they did this among other things with geothermal energy extraction, concrete core activation, central heating connection and weather-dependent room control. The requirements of the technology were accordingly high. The people in charge laid the cornerstone for the optimal usage of all of building technology by favoring the RC-BIS room automation system from RaumComputer with the support of WAGO automation components. “As the basis for communication we also selected an IP-based data transmission via ETHERNET,” emphasizes Christoph Gesing of Lanfer Automation, whose company has a long-standing partnership with WAGO, especially when it comes to industrial automation.

Industrial PCs at the information focal points
For the H2Office, a total of three information focal points were set up for the control and monitoring of primary systems. Two of these are in the central roof stations and the other in the basement of the building. The central control units for all three information node points are WAGO industrial computers, which are WAGO-I/O-IPC-C6 models equipped with a 600 MHz Intel Celeron processor. They have all traditional PC communication interfaces, as well as the PLC development environment CoDeSys and are mounted directly on a DIN rail in the switch cabinet. The industrial PCs in the H2Office are solely responsible for managing more than 1700 data points. In addition to heating and cooling, fresh and exhaust air, these include fault monitoring for the sprinkler system, access control, the drinking water pressure increasing system and waste water pumps.
For the visualization of this data, Lanfer Automation used the WEBfactory software, which can be accessed via Internet. This was an essential requirement for linking the visualization homogeneously with the RC-BIS management system. “So that the system remains operable in manual mode despite its complexity, we decided against the usual manual operating level. Instead of physical switches, each information focal point is equipped with its own touch panel. Combined with the WAGO industrial PCs, it is possible to access the WEBfactory visualization using the touch panels – and do it as precisely as any other PC on the network,” explains Gesing. This way, each of these switch cabinets are autonomous controllers with unlimited administrative control. With the graphical user interface, the building technicians can intervene nearly intuitively without having to be familiar with every circuit diagram in detail.

System distributors in the ceilings and hollow floors
The control of room automation was made just as user-friendly in the H2Office as the administration of the primary systems. The sun position-dependent window blinds control, daylight-dependent DALI lighting in the conference rooms and underfloor convectors can be managed without special programming knowledge via RC-BIS building management system developed by RaumComputer. “In order to guarantee flexible use of all of the space, we installed a total of 30 system distributors in the suspended ceilings and hollow floors,” explains Christian Hay: “In the interest of creating a continuous system solution, we relied here too on WAGO automation hardware, specifically on the WAGO-I/O-SYSTEM 750 with ETHERNET controllers. Thus, even on the automation level there was an IP-based data exchange, which allowed smooth fieldbus communication between all systems.”
Beyond gold certification awarded by the DGNB after construction, there have been other benefits of the WAGO-based ETHERNET TPC/IP automation concept. Even before the H2Office was officially dedicated, some parts of the building technology had to be ready for operation so that the first tenants could move in. “RaumComputer and Lanfer Automation were able to accomplish this early start-up and the final handover to the principals flawlessly thanks in part to our flexible and modular automation hardware,” summarizes Michael Dewald, who together with his colleagues from WAGO project sales, supported this project all the way from acquisition to handover.