Auburn University
IN-4: Innovation 4

The majority of the buildings on Auburn University's main campus are heated and cooled through a District Energy loop with a series of natural gas boilers that generate the hot water for the system. Two boilers carry the hot water load for the main campus for the majority of the year. On the two primary boilers, Auburn University partnered with the campus natural gas provider (ALAGASCO) to install two Hawk ICS controllers in 2011. The Hawk ICS is a control device that automatically trims the boiler in order to maintain a high efficiency no matter how the campus hot water load fluctuates. It balances the fuel to air ratio for optimum combustion efficiency. Our boilers before the retrofit had mechanical linkages that were set up and tuned at startup in order to have the boilers operate as efficiently as possible. This was a good start but did not account for the load swings. The result of installing the Hawk ICS controllers was a 5% increase in efficiency for each boiler (from ~82% - 87%). This is a substantial savings in fuel cost as well as a reduction in emissions from these boilers.