Siemens has partnered with Dubai’s Expo 2020 in the field of digitalised infrastructure. Expo 2020 was delayed to 2021 because of the pandemic, and will run until March 2022.
The Expo site features pavilions to showcase the cultures and technologies of different countries, residential and commercial property developments, and pavilions that focus on sustainability, mobility and opportunity. For Siemens, this means setting up the smart city technologies for Expo, which will continue to be used after March 2022 when the site will become District 2020, a new Dubai neighbourhood. Eighty percent of the buildings being used for Expo will remain in place permanently.
Thomas Kiessling CTO, Siemens Smart Infrastructure, outlined some of the ways the company’s smart city technologies are being used to meet health, safety, security and environment targets during the event – and afterwards.
Kiessling said the digitalisation process involves technology such as digital twins, “enabling electrical products” and data twins, which are needed for “a seamless flow of information, such as real-time data [and] automated services”. This includes sensor technology that provides data to send alerts before small issues become big problems and create algorithms about building use to improve efficiency and safety.
“Use cases include detecting gas leaks and inefficient energy use,” Kiessling said. “Automated systems, such as turning off lights and cooling in parts of buildings when nobody is there, are proactive rather than reactive.”
“With energy efficiency, digital representation reaps 20-30% in energy savings,” he said.”Digital twinning is happening across all industrial sectors, it is a 30-40-year megatrend.”
Kiessling explained that “smart buildings need a vision”, becoming “smart through simple, remote analytics.”
“Smart buildings are self-adapting [with] automated analytics and artificial intelligence based on building twins,” he said. “Algorithms learn behaviours in buildings to save energy [and can] pre-cooling ceilings and walls according to weather forecasts”.
He gave examples of how Siemens smart city technology has been applied to real world sites, with demonstrable improvements in metrics, such as energy use, reduced maintenance costs and early fault detection.
Dubai’s Trident Grand Residence has moved to digitalised maintenance for fault detection diagnostics, which has reduced reactive maintenance tickets by 30%. At Southern Methodist University in Texas, this technology has saved $2 million in operational and maintenance costs and resulted in 60% remote resolution of issues. At the University of Birmingham, a living laboratory to connect the technology with university research. It is the largest rollout of IoT on a university campus. In addition, the university is using solar energy, EV mobility for on-campus transport and smart technology has been retrofitted on existing buildings. Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Taiwan, has reported 40% energy savings through smart detection technologies.
Courtesy Georgia Lewis
