GERMANY: Bitzer’s new international training centre has won a German building award for its responsible use of resources and minimal energy consumption.
Opened at the beginning of this year and located in Rottenburg-Ergenzingen on the grounds of the Bitzer competence centre for screw compressors, the Schaufler Academy has been recognised in the New Building category of the Deutscher TGA-Award.
The 16-member specialist jury for technical building services awarded the specialist team of planners commissioned by Bitzer for the Academy.
The team worked on an energy concept designed to combine flexibility in terms of building use with the responsible use of resources and minimal energy consumption. Heating and cooling are provided by heat pumps, underground latent storage (ice storage), a solar thermal collector and a combined heat and power system.
“This concept underlines our commitment to developing products for sustainable energy use and climate protection. As such, the Academy allows us to present systems featuring Bitzer components to our customers in a direct way,” commented Volker Stamer, Schaufler Academy director. The ice storage system collects temporarily available cooling and thermal energy, which can be retrieved when it is required. This enables Bitzer to balance the fluctuating energy supply, while also using renewable sources of energy for space heating and cooling.
“We installed a heat pump with two Bitzer Orbit 8 scroll compressors of the type GSD80295 for the building heating and cooling. With their high efficiency at full-load and part-load and the wide application limits for which they’re known, these compressors are ideal for heat pump systems with reverse cycling,” emphasised Dr Armin Walz, Bitzer’s head of application engineering.
The integrated heat pump is responsible for a large part of the building heating and covers the base load of the building cooling. A liquid chiller is also responsible for the mechanical cooling of demonstration systems and covering peak loads in building cooling. By using Bitzer’s CSVH26-200Y compact screw compressor with integrated frequency inverter, the cooling system can be infinitely adjusted between 16 and 100% and the entire system used very efficiently. The liquid chiller also features heat recovery to support building heating.
Klaus Rauer of the Rauer Planung engineering firm said: “The Schaufler Academy can serve as an example to many other projects, as this involved some major energy challenges that had to be overcome both economically and practically.”
- Multifunctional Building
Bitzer had planned for the Schaufler Academy to be a multifunctional building from the very beginning. The new three-storey building is 10m tall and has five rooms for theoretical and three areas for practical training. Three training rooms can also be connected to form a large lecture hall that can accommodate up to 120 people. With a gross floor area of 3,400m2, the building can host several training courses at the same time. In addition, the Schaufler Academy contains office space for the training staff and a cafeteria with seating for 110 people.
- Training Courses
“Technological progress and new regulations are steadily increasing the demand for well-trained specialist personnel,” said Volker Stamer. “We accommodate this demand with our international training centre and, in addition to our CO2 seminars, also offer courses, for instance, on ammonia applications and inverter compressors. We also offer hydrocarbon training courses, which tend to focus on the use of propane in refrigeration and air conditioning systems.”
