Ice arena O’Brien Group Arena

The ice rink houses two Olympic-size ice rinks, state-of-the-art sound and lighting systems, seating for up to 1,000 people, a special fitness room for winter sports, a café, a bar and meeting rooms.

The OPEN EMS system from DEOS AG was selected as the controller for the ventilation system. The DEOS building automation system was chosen in particular for the O’Brien Group Arena because DEOS has exclusive rights in Australia for the COBAOPT optimisation system (now: OPENdynamics), which was developed in Germany.

In the specific case of the ice rink, the HVAC system had to be aligned so that the temperature on the ice surface was -2 °C, 1.5 m above the ice surface 14 °C. An additional difficulty related to heat stratification is the ceiling height (> 10 m) and the heat transport and melting of the ice. Furthermore, the ice surface has two different textures. The COBAOPT system was chosen as the solution. It uses a unique control algorithm with simple programmability to achieve uniform mixing of the air molecules. The result is uniform temperature distribution and energy savings for the HVAC systems.