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Module 18 · Real Project

Real Project: Hospital HVAC Fault Detection & Diagnostics Upgrade

A 320-bed acute care hospital case study — FDD rule configuration for AHUs serving ORs, isolation rooms, and protective environment rooms, tiered alarm prioritization to defeat alert fatigue, read-only BAS integration, and real faults caught where a missed one carries life-safety stakes.

The project brief: a hospital generating 340 undifferentiated alarms per day from fixed high/low thresholds on its existing BAS needs a fault detection and diagnostics layer that can distinguish a genuine, sustained pressure-relationship failure in an operating room or isolation room — where the consequence of a miss is a real infection-control incident — from routine door-traffic noise, without ever writing to a single life-safety control point.

This module walks the whole deployment the way a real controls engineer would: persistence-based room-pressure fault rules tuned against real door-swing transients, a three-tier alarm prioritization scheme with root-cause aggregation that cut alarm volume by 97% without losing information, a deliberate read-only integration architecture and why it mattered here specifically, three real faults caught (including an active-TB isolation room losing negative pressure) and their consequence if missed, and how staff trust was rebuilt after years of alarm fatigue. The full worked numbers, complete points/equipment list, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.

Free related reading in this studio
→ HVAC Fault Injection Simulator→ BAS Sequence Simulator→ CO₂ Ventilation Rate Calculator

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