Controller evaluation
Evaluate the controller on your own refrigeration system.
For supermarket and cold-storage operators, and for manufacturers who build refrigeration equipment. The evaluation starts with your machine, measures a baseline before anything changes, and is designed to show what the controller does on that machine before any wider rollout.
Two ways in
Run it on a system you operate, or build it into the equipment you sell.
Refrigeration operators
- Evaluate the controller on an existing system, against a baseline measured on that system
- Pilot costs, installation duties, data access and any share of savings agreed in writing first
- Your building or plant system keeps the goals: setpoints, schedules and demand-response signals
Equipment manufacturers
- The controller ships inside your equipment, licensed per unit, as part of your product
- Controller hardware, sensor and actuator channel counts and the enclosure defined with you
- Validation duties, and who owns what, set in the agreement
How it runs
Five steps, with the baseline before the controller.
- Review the systemRefrigerant, compressors, valves, cases or coils, the controls in place today and the safeties.
- Agree the interfacesWhich readings and actuators the controller takes, which controllers it replaces and which stay.
- Measure the baselineEnergy and temperatures on the system as it runs today, by a method agreed up front.
- Fit and runAReCoS fits a model to your machine and checks it against your own test data; then the controller runs it.
- Verify, then decideResults set against the baseline before anything goes further.
Where a case keeps a thermostatic expansion valve, the controller is designed to set the compressors, fans and defrost around it; the full optimum needs an electronic valve fitted in the retrofit (more).
Safeguards
The machine's own protection stays where it is.
- Safeties stay independent
- The machine's own safeties, hard-wired or on a compressor package's own panel, are not in the controller's path.
- Fail-safe outputs
- If the controller loses power, stops or is taken out of service, its outputs are designed to go to the fail-safe positions set for your machine; on a rack, normally the fallback it already has.
- No command from the internet
- Every control decision is designed to run on the equipment. An optional cloud connection is designed only to monitor (security).
- Commissioning plan
- Start-up, fallback and hand-back are written down with your team before the controller takes over.
What has been tested
What is on the record today, and what an evaluation is for.
- Hardware test
- The controller ran a vapor-compression system in cooling, reading its temperature sensors only and setting the compressor, electronic expansion valve, air blower and fan together (US 2024/0295337 A1, FIGS. 4 to 7).
- Research agreement
- Being tested with Oak Ridge National Laboratory under a research agreement (CRADA) supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, on rooftop-unit energy optimization.
- Not yet run
- On a supermarket rack, a CO2 system or an ammonia plant. Refrigeration plants and natural refrigerants are within the design scope, still to be validated: that is what an evaluation on your machine is for.
Every claim and its evidence: evidence and status.