KNX Controls Commercial Building in Brazil and Saves Hundreds of Cars from Water Damage

SC-401 Square Corporate is located in Florianópolis Island in the South of Brazil. Conceived by CFL Constructions, it is a commercial complex with seven integrated towers holding 630 stores.

Integrating automation, security and access control under one BMSIt took from 2015 to 2017 for 14 year-old automation company, Smart Homes, to complete the project. Smart Homes specified and installed all of the systems involved. The greatest challenge in this project was to integrate the automation with security and access control in a single Building Management System (BMS). We chose the TYCO CCURE BMS integrated with TYCO CCURE 9000 platform.

Long cable lengthsThe second challenge was the long connection distances involved, which necessitated the use fibre optic cable. We chose the Furukawa Laserway GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Network) comprising 700 ONUs (Optical Network Units) on 40km fibre optic cable.

Prepared for Mother NatureThis was a dream project that successfully automated a wide range of functions including water pumps, water levels, water consumption, sewage treatment, lighting control, electrical consumption, electric generator control, HVAC, access control, security, and fire prevention. We used 80 KNX devices from HDL, ABB, Siemens and Hager, as well as over 1000 fire detection devices tyhat were all networked and supervised. In addition, the installation includes 192 Hikivision IP cameras, 3 Exacq Vision NVRs (Network Video Recorders), 60 RFID readers and 15 TYCO Software House iStar controllers.

Thanks to the agility and reliability of the technology used in this project, the speed at which the system is notified of an error in an electric pump, or an emergency protocol starts, is particularly impressive. For example: in this region of Brazil, there are periodic floods each year. The SC-401 Square Corporate building has an underground automated gate that sensed a high water level last winter and automatically closed, saving hundreds of cars from being water damaged.

Smart Homes is currently contracted to take care of preventative maintenance, and is able to observe everyday routines and how well systems cope with their particular responsibilities.

KNX makes huge savingsThis kind of special solution by itself pays for the initial investment (CAPEX), on top of which are the savings on operating expenses (OPEX), including a reduction in the number of people required to walk around and check the security and automation status in a building of this size.

Project: SC401 Square Corporate

A project by: Smart Homes

Contact: Guilherme Angeloni