By the way - the pictures are some buildings where I have worked on controls specifications over the years (they have no real purpose - but nice photos break up the words quite nicely don't you think?).
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| St Johns Cambridge |
Why? - Per Wikipedia - An oxymoron (plural oxymora or oxymorons) (from Greek ὀξύμωρον, "sharp dull") is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms.
Certainly any document that is wholly generic, cannot be specific to anything other than a genera. So a "Generic Specification" is a self-contradiction - Like military Intelligence :)
But, rather like a curates` egg which euphemistically describes selectivity :
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| White Tower (part of Tower of London) (Boiler Sequencing) |
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| HSBC Hong Kong (Virtual study of turbines) |
Host (solicitously) - "How is your egg?"
Curate (politely) - "Rather good! - in parts",
it is I suppose, quite reasonable to adopt the idea of a standard template. A template applies to all instances where it is applied and so in and of itself it is wholly generic, the differences (or specifics) can populate the template that are particular to some control plant.
So the idea of a generic template is not so crazy. It is actually what many controls text books attempt to describe. However an on-line tool could be interactive, and generate high quality potentially interactive (as a learning tool) output.
This has me wondering - would readers (there are not so many of you) find it useful if I started producing some careful specification of generic controls solutions for the HVAC field, that could be safely cut and pasted with the "blanks filled in"?
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| BP Sunbury (Air-Handlingy) |
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| London Guildhall (Boiler Sequencing and Economizers) |
To my mind BMS systems are essentially and should be treated as a commodity.
Obviously (I hope), my focus would be on design for efficiency.
I envisage a series of libraries eg for a VT zone several control solutions types can apply depending on plant supported by them and they can be paramterized as follows:
The zone has a name (obviously a text input field), and primary source of hot water
Selectors (eg Fahrenheit / Celsius) will support internationalisation (that is to say Amercians)
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| Barclay's One Churchill Place Heat Recovery |
A suitably labelled, illustrative diagram would be accompanied, together with pseudo implementation code or function block diagrams to assist implementation. Plus comments and issues to be aware of from an efficiency perspective
If anyone is interested please do leave a comment below (otherwise I will just do it as and when it takes my fancy - it has to be of more value and interest than an auto-biography!).
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