A collaboration between Kelvion, adesso and Microsoft to support customers

The simulation shows how the climate conditions specifically affect the operating costs of a dry cooler operated in Dortmund, Germany. The operating costs are calculated, amongst others, in kilowatt hours for driving the fans or in cubic metres [M³/H] of water consumption for adiabatic cooling. The weather profile feature in RT Select maps a temperature range from -8 to 40 degrees Celsius; only an extract is shown in the figure.

The automated calculations show how quickly sometimes higher initial costs can be amortised by low operating costs.

“Kelvion Select RT is a complex digital configuration platform for heat exchangers in refrigeration,” explains Christian Sorowik, the IT Project Lead at Kelvion. “Based on different parameters such as temperature or fluid, when using Kelvion Select RT, the right heat exchanger can be found with just a few clicks and designed according to individual operating conditions.” Now there is an important upgrade: with the Ambient Weather function, developed by the IT service provider adesso, different weather profiles and extreme weather conditions can now be predicted automatically. With the “Azure” cloud solution, Microsoft has provided the technological basis.

Shape the future with innovation
adesso, Microsoft and Kelvion could not be a better match: all three combine innovative spirit, the desire to make future actions sustainable and the drive to advance digital transformation through smart products. As a result, those three companies have redesigned and integrated an important feature into Kelvion Select RT.

A sustainable and reliable planning
In Kelvion Select RT, the future location of the heat exchanger plays a decisive role when selecting and designing the product. Because the operation of a heat exchanger in the Arctic or deserts places different technical demands on the equipment - and these must be calculated in advance.

Otherwise, the efficiency of the heat exchanger can be reduced or even lead to an early breakdown. “Our customers are located in all latitudes around the world and have to anticipate different weather conditions – sometimes the weather conditions are extreme,” says Sascha Ostermann, Global Sales & Solutions Manager at Kelvion. “Furthermore, new heat records are causing uncertainty as to how these extremes affect the service life of the heat exchangers. Thanks to the data in RT Select, a data-based purchase decision is now possible that automatically takes extreme weather conditions into account during configuration."

The annual operating costs and consumption can be determined using a similar principle. With an annual simulation, customers can compare individual products with just a few clicks and make a data-based purchase decision.

"Our customers are increasingly opting for efficient and resource-saving devices, even if they are not always the cheapest ones to buy," adds Sascha Ostermann. "The price alone is no longer the decisive factor in the purchase, but rather the life-cycle costs."

Calculate extreme environmental influences precisely
With the Ambient Weather function, adesso has created a way of automatically taking local weather conditions into account in the configuration phase. The user can use a weather table to get an overview of the climatic conditions in a city. If the heat exchanger is to be used in Las Vegas, USA, the extreme temperature ranges from -6 to 46°C must be taken into account. But Kelvion RT Select goes even further. The tool also saves a weather history that goes back up to ten years.

“One of the challenges was working with the amount of data,” explains Stefanie Schwilski, the Senior Software Engineer at adesso and the developer of the configuration platform Kelvion Select RT. “There is climate information for a city or place for every hour of the year. That makes 8,760 data entries in the year and the data usually goes back 40 years. From this we have calculated suggestions for the users that reflect the environmental conditions of the desired location as representatively as possible.” With the new feature, Kelvion not only sets new standards in product selection and configuration, but also creates excellent planning conditions.

With Azure, Microsoft has provided a cloud-based solution that is easy to use and can be configured according to individual requirements. The integrated Azure cloud services help with collaboration and support the continuous development of the platform. Forward planning and close cooperation between Microsoft and Kelvion were key to success.  So, Kelvion made an early decision to replace its existing, self-operated application lifecycle management tools with Azure DevOps Services. ”This provides an integrated end-to-end view of the entire development process,” says Philipp Teilmeier Azure Specialist - Application Innovation at Microsoft . “We trained key stakeholders at Kelvion early on so that they could apply their knowledge and share it within the company.. Microsoft Azure provides Kelvion with the right cloud-native services to run applications efficiently and with a focus on the end user. From the wide range of platform services (PaaS), we worked with Kelvion to develop different target architectures that met all technical and non-technical requirements.”  Another advantage of the Azure cloud: while the entire platform is hosted in Europe, Kelvion is able to set up the platform in America or Asia within an hour at any time, thanks to Microsoft technology.

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