“Our technology could make the ETH Industry Day cooler.”

Why did you come to the ETH Industry Day?

My colleagues and I have visited this event for many years and always enjoyed hearing about the latest research topics. The atmosphere of this event is very inspiring. It’s great to see how enthusiastic the researchers are about their projects and about collaborating with industry.

What do you take home?

For us, the most important thing is to see how broad the research at ETH Zurich is. Out of this broad spectrum, we can then filter out the topics that are of interest to our business. Our domain is mainly energy efficiency and building automation. Our goal is to define the role of buildings in a changing environment, make buildings more energy efficient and contribute to the use of renewable energies. ETH Zurich is a good arena for pioneering ideas and helps us to keep pace with the newest developments.

Can you give an example?

We have a close collaboration with Prof. Arno Schlüter and the Future Cities Laboratory at the Singapore-ETH Centre. One of our joint projects is called 3for2. This concept is a further step in decentralizing building systems to lower energy consumption and raising comfort.

What is the idea behind 3for2?

It is a new method of air conditioning in tropical climates. In contrast to the conventional approach, we do not have huge centralized systems in the building to produce cold and dry air. Instead we have integrated and decentralized systems that consume less energy, improve the comfort and significantly save space by reducing the floor height. By decoupling the process of cooling and drying, we can drive the process with less temperature differences. This new approach is called LowEx and has been invented at ETH Zurich. It was first shown for heating applications in Switzerland. And now, the team of Prof. Schlüter proved that this concept can also be used for cooling in tropical climate.

We almost had tropical climate here today at the ETH Industry Day.

Indeed. Actually, I am convinced that this building here at ETH Hönggerberg would be a perfect candidate for our 3for2 approach. You could add it to the existing building without changing the structure too much and achieving an energy efficient cooling. That would be a nice pilot project for Prof. Schlüter and would result in a much cooler Industry Day.

How do you experience the cooperation with ETH Zurich?

It’s a wonderful and close collaboration. We have been working together with ETH Zurich for a long time. With the project 3for2, we have a good interaction between Prof. Schlüter’s team at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, our regional Siemens branch in Singapore and the pre-development team in our headquarter here in Switzerland. We received a lot of positive feedback and I would call it a big success.