‘CoolVent’, a solution for efficient ventilation control across the university campus, is being developed by a team of experts from the Co-Innovation lab at University of Applied Sciences in Munich. The application contributes to the possibility of reducing energy consumption and therefore save costs and expenses.
High energy consumption and the resulting rising costs
In times of energy transition and climate change, the focus is on particularly high energy consumption, which can be reduced through intelligent applications. Also public institutions want to and have to contribute to a sustainable future. Nevertheless traditional ventilation systems are often inefficient and can lead to unnecessary energy consumption, since smart technologies are not yet being used in this context. This ultimately leads to higher costs for the facility. Therefore a lot of energy is consumed for cooling rooms that are not used. Building energy consumption has become a major concern for facility management teams and university departments.
Data generated insights for energy saving
“Showing the potential of data generated insight for energy saving” – With this mission statement as a guiding principle, Matthias Maier, research associate at HM, commissioned the expert team. In the context of helpful coaching by Prof. Dr. Lars Brehm, Prof Dr.-Ing. Holger Günzel, Prof. Dr. Johannes Ebke, and Hans Jürgen Haak, the student team developed a concept and the accompanying application ‘CoolVent’ that is useful for energy saving by optimizing ventilation settings. The student team is composed of the business students Fabian Langseder, Laura Lenk and Benedikt Henning and IT students Aleksandar Culafic, Laurenz Fuchs, Julia Kassapidis, Maximilian Reichl and Yannik Zbick.
“Through an application that is precisely developed according to the stakeholder needs and directly with the users feedback, we want to make energy saving simple and transparent” – Scrum Master from the ‘CoolVent’ Team. ‘CoolVent’ is a user-friendly web-application that allows facility managers to increase efficiency of the controlling for the ventilation systems according to room occupancy and air quality data. The system utilizes data gathered by sensors installed in several rooms across the campus and obtains important information about the semester planning. The room plan is then aggregated and displayed in a transparent view to help the facility manager to efficiently adjust the ventilation at the beginning of the semester. In addition, with sensor data, very granular adjustments can be made regularly, based on recommendations from live sensor data, which measures whether a room was actually occupied at the planned times This allows fine adjustments to be made at regular intervals throughout the semester.
„The ‘CoolVent’ System, developed by the student team, can be used by the facility management to improve operation times of their ventilation systems. This would lead to significant reductions of the universities energy demand, as well as operational costs.”– Cooperation Partner, Matthias Maier.
Video Music: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/REW_1123/dead-sea/the-lowest-place-on-earthmp3/
About the Digital Innovation Lab and the Co-Innovation Lab
This solution was designed in a joint project between the Digital Transformation Lab and the Co-Innovation Lab of Hochschule München guided by the lecturers Prof. Dr. Holger Günzel, Prof. Dr. Lars Brehm, Prof. Dr. Johannes Ebke and Hans-Jürgen Haak. The Co-Innovation Lab offers students a virtual platform for learning how to work as a consulting team by creating temporary partnerships between companies, students, and lecturers.
For more information about the Co-Innovation Lab, contact holger.guenzel@hm.edu or lars.brehm@hm.edu.
This Co-Innovation Lab project was carried out in cooperation with the Digital Transformation Lab (DT.Lab) at Munich University of Applied Sciences:
“The Digital Transformation Lab (DT.Lab) at Munich University of Applied Sciences is dedicated to the major social challenges of our time. Together with stakeholders in the private sector, students develop future-oriented solutions. They are supported by Amazon Web Services with state-of-the-art cloud technologies and the Working Backwards innovation methodology. We live digital transformation.”
More information about the Co-Innovation Lab and the Digital Transformation Lab (DT.Lab) at Munich University of Applied Sciences:
- Website Co-Innovation Lab: https://www.co-inno-lab.org/
- Website DT.Lab: https://hm.edu/dt-lab/ & Challenge auf der DTLab-Website
Authors: Project team