Heat-only, direct-fired, and indirect-fired makeup air units have been added to the company’s product line. 

While traditional hospital HVAC systems often consist of chillers and boilers, other types of equipment are becoming more widely accepted in the health care market, including variable refrigerant flow (VRF) systems, air curtains, and geothermal heat pumps. 

Once only found in mild climates, the technology now stretches across the U.S., thanks to advances in inverter technology and zone controls. On the other hand, the level of sophistication in these systems sometimes makes them difficult to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

In collaboration with Tropic Supply, Cooper&Hunter has gifted Daytona State College with six complete HVAC systems, considering the donation as a useful investment in the next generation. The on-campus working stations, which include units from Cooper&Hunter’s modern “Sophia Mini-Split Single Zone Series,” will give students hands-on learning opportunities with technology that is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S.

An HVAC solution was the headliner for an event on Feb. 19 at a 121-year-old building in the nation’s capital named after one of America’s greatest composer-musicians. The event at Duke Ellington School of the Arts demonstrated how stepping beyond traditional non-inverter HVAC systems can preserve a building’s historical architecture, enhance energy efficiencies, minimize noise, and earn design-award accolades.

Many of Fujitsu General America’s Halcyon mini-split system products now qualify for Energy Star Most Efficient certification.

As the federal government plans millions in grant funding to boost heat-pump manufacturing in the U.S., a big player in the market as well as a newcomer are thrilled with the opportunity.

Musk confirmed that his company could make use of their current heat pump technology to develop a smart HVAC system for home use.

Every year, The NEWS introduces the latest cooling equipment available for the upcoming summer season in order to help contractors prepare for this busy period by doing the research that will help them to distinguish between brands. The coverage features specific information about each individual product as submitted by the manufacturers.

Each year, The NEWS spotlights the industry’s latest commercial heating products. The manufacturers provided us with a brief description of features included with each product.

This handheld device displays CO, CO₂, air temperature, rh, dew point, and wet bulb temperature measurements.

Designed for HVAC and refrigeration professionals to view electrical and temperature readings, this product logs data remotely using the ExView® W-Series app on smartphones and tablets via Bluetooth.

HVAC has a critical role to play in the future of building automation and digitalization.

Small- to medium-sized buildings make up about 94% of all commercial buildings in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, yet only 13% of those buildings have a building automation system.

IEC Systems is a provider of turnkey proprietary and nonproprietary building automation systems (BASs) and a Distech Controls authorized system integrator.

For more HVAC contractors to sell zoning systems, they have to understand the benefits, challenges, know how to approach customers to even be able to sell it, and then comes the install.

Customers looking for increased value out of their HVAC systems will find high-end features like connectivity, greater efficiency, and more intuitive controls attractive.

If contractors in colder climates focus on educating their customers on what new higher-efficiency furnaces bring to the table, often times the furnaces will sell themselves.

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

Posted by CISA on Mar 23

In recent episodes we have discusses statically and dynamically typed languages and domain specific languages - topics that are much talked about in the community at the moment. In this episode we look at the foundation of programming languages : types. We explain what a type actually is, how type systems work and what polymorphism works.

This Episode is a round table discussion about Ultra-Large Scale Systems. In 2006, a number of authors (among them our guests Linda Northrop, Doug Schmidt, Kevin Sullivan, and Gregor Kiczales) have produced a report that addressed the following question: Given the issues with today's software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code? In this episode, our guests discuss many of the issues that arise from this kind of system and provide an overview of the research areas that should be investigated in order to tackle the challenge. If you want to get more detailed information, you can read the ULS Report (PDF).

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

This episode is an introduction to embedded system. It is an introduction in the sense that we cover many topics very briefly: upcoming episodes will provides details for many of these topics. We start by discussing what an embedded system is an what the important characteristics are. Among them is limited resources, concurrency, real time and hardware integration. We also discuss the range of embedded systems from small mirocontrollers to mobile phones to distributed real time embedded systems. We also cover the different business case for embedded systems (per unit cost) and some non-trivial developmental aspects (cross compilation debugging, heisenbugs). We close the episode by discussing some important architectural styles (time triggered, event-based, microkernels, state machines) as well as tools of the trade: languages, operating systems and middleware.

This episode is a conversation with Bruce Powel Douglass on real time systems. We started by discussing what real time software is, and explored the difference between hard and soft real time. We then looked at different scheduling strategies, and the meaning of terms like urgency and importance in the context of scheduling. Next was a discussion of typical architectural styles for real time systems and how architectures are described in this context. This led us to a discussion about the importance of modeling, formalisms and languages as well as the role of automatic code generation from those models. We then looked at how to model QoS aspects and the role of SysML for modeling real time systems. We then had a brief look at which programming languages are used these days for real time systems and the role of static analysis to determine various properties of those programs in advance. The last part of the discussion focused on some best practices for building real time systems, the challenges in distributed real time systems and how real time systems can be tested effectively.

This episode is a conversation with Jan Bosch about product line engineering (PLE). Jan has worked in various roles and industries and academia in the context of product lines. In this episode we look at Jan's view of what is next for product lines: software ecosystems. What is their relationship to PLE and how should PLE change to remain relevant?

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Wil van der Aalst Robert Blumen interviews Professor Wil van der Aalst of the Technical University of Eindhoven, one of the world’s leading researchers in business process management and workflow systems. Professor van der Aalst leads off with an overview of the main concepts in the field business processes, business process […]

Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a […]

Senior performance architect and author of *Systems Performance* Brendan Gregg talks with Robert Blumen about systems performance: how the hardware and OS layers affect application behavior. The discussion covers the scope of systems performance, systems performance in the software life cycle, the role of performance analysis in architecture, methodologies for solving performance problems, dynamic tracing and tracing tools such as DTrace, the disk and file subsystems, the CPU and memory subsystems, and the challenges virtualization poses for performance analysts.

Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about the challenges developers face when building distributed systems, whether the can avoid building them at all, and what changes occur once they do.

Donny Nadolny of PagerDuty joins Robert Blumen to tell the story of debugging an issue that PagerDuty encountered when they set up a Zookeeper cluster that spanned across two geographically separated datacenters in different regions.

Dr. Andrii Gakhov, author of the book Probabilistic Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Data Applications talks about probabilistic data structures and their application to the big data domain with host Robert Blumen.

Learn how to simplify your application architecture with the introduction of a messaging system. You'll hear how different messaging patterns can make your application more flexible, easier to maintain, and improve its performance.

Bob Kepford discusses Decoupled CMS. Many CMS practitioners are adopting a decoupled approach to improve scale, allow for more specialized roles, and to separate data collection from delivery. Host Jeff Doolittle spoke with Kepford about what makes a Decoupled CMS different.

Sven Schleier and Jeroen Willemsen from the OWASP Mobile Application Security Verification Standard and Testing Guide project discuss mobile application security and how the verification standard and testing guide can be used to improve your app’s...

Brent Simmons, the developer of the NetNewsWire RSS reader, is questioning his decision to put an unread count next to each feed, reasoning that it encourages people to be too obsessive about reading every item:

Instead of a dozen bookmarks, people had a hundred feeds. Or two hundred. Or two thousand.

And there was a tyranny behind keeping track of unread items and showing an unread count. People reacted in different ways, but many people felt like they always had to go through everything.

Including me. To this day.

I did not know this was going to happen. That was not the idea: it was a side effect of reasonable (at the time) choices.

I like seeing these counts on feeds where I need to read all items that are posted, but that's only a small percentage of the 100-120 feeds I follow. It would be nice to turn that off for others I read more casually.

Feedly presents unread counts on each feed and folder of feeds. There's a Mark As Read button to clear a count, but when you click it, the confirmation dialog acts like it's an extremely consequential decision: "Are you sure you want to mark this entire source as read? This operation cannot be undone."

I've posed a question on the RSS-Public mailing list: Do you think feed readers should count unread items?

Nowadays, it seems that everything we do tends to be somehow automated. The very same is happening in electrical distribution systems. The distribution system at the medium voltage (MV) or low voltage (LV) levels is designed using different structures such... Read more

The post The essentials of automation applied to distribution systems via PLCs, SCADA, IEDs, and RTUs appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Communication systems of electric utilities have become increasingly critical to electric system protection, operation, and maintenance. For fast tripping and clearing of system faults, communication-aided relaying has become a common protection scheme, particularly in line protection. Control centers depend on... Read more

The post Schematics and docs needed for communication systems of substation protective relaying system appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Electrical distribution systems comprise a large number of remote applications and locations, and it has traditionally been challenging to monitor and regulate these remote applications and sites. Utility companies have been installing remote terminal/telemetry units, often known as RTUs, at... Read more

The post Three most common SCADA applications in MV/LV distribution systems you SHOULD know appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

New Articles Entry: 'Writing in English problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Listening in English problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Reading in English problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Teaching three students problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Speaking English problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

New Articles Entry: 'Reading English with your child: problems and solutions' has just been added to the Articles area of UsingEnglish.com.

This technical article discusses criteria and requirements for designing protection systems for busbars in HV/EHV networks. One of the most critical requirements is reliable busbar relay protection to assure power system integrity during fault conditions. This requirement is further emphasized because... Read more

The post Design issues in HV busbar protection systems (substation topology and DC power supply) appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

Many young engineers consider cement plants pretty complicated because of their weird technology. The reason probably lies in the fact that you cannot understand all those technologies unless you worked in such a plant and saw all processes from scratch.... Read more

The post The essentials of electrical systems in cement plants appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.

The countries of the European Economic Area (EEA) have agreed on common minimum regulatory requirements in order to ensure the free movement of products within the EEA. The CE marking indicates that the product works in conformity with the directives... Read more

The post EN61800-3 (IEC1800-3) – Adjustable speed electrical power drive systems appeared first on EEP - Electrical Engineering Portal.