Emerson Constructing Home in Helix Innovation Center
The 'home inside a building' will serve as a working laboratory
DAYTON, Ohio — A 2,000-square-foot, two-story home is being built inside The Helix innovation center by Emerson Climate Technologies Inc., a business segment of Emerson. The “home inside a building” will serve as a working laboratory, enabling faster testing of the company’s future innovations in comfort, energy savings, and connected-home concepts. The residential connected-home module, which will feature ambient controls to simulate a range of below-freezing to hot, humid weather conditions, is being constructed by Emerson as one of five modules within The Helix innovation center on the University of Dayton campus.
“We will be evaluating comfort and energy savings from every angle,” said Hung Pham, director of integrated technologies, air conditioning business, Emerson Climate Technologies. “This home module in The Helix will allow us to change refrigerants, HVAC systems, airflow, and weather to help evaluate the impact on human comfort and health from the standpoint of air conditioning, heating, IAQ, humidity, noise, lighting, and other factors.”
Emerson’s residential module will feature three bedrooms, a family room, one-and-a-half bathrooms, a kitchen with appliances, a laundry room, a water heater, a home audio system, a home theater, an attic, a roof, a crawl space, and a security system. Various types of heating and air conditioning systems will be accessible, and capabilities will be provided to host new systems, as well. To support work on efficiency improvements, the home and HVAC systems will have separate meters to measure energy consumption.
“Consumer demands for comfort, connectivity, energy savings, and environmentally friendly features are shaping the future of this industry, but we also need to think about current and future regulatory requirements,” Pham said. “Emerson’s collaborative research with its OEM customers and other channel partners in this residential connected-home module will focus on identifying current unmet needs, developing innovations for tomorrow’s needs, and improving the performance of our technology in existing applications.”
Publication date: 6/15/2015
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