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Automated Systems For The HVAC Sector

The HVAC sector has evolved rapidly over recent years, with the development of new technologies, regulations, and sustainability standards.

Energy efficiency is critical for reducing energy costs and reducing environmental impact, with the global energy crisis resulting in growing demand for green and sustainable products. The HVAC industry faces many challenges. Increasingly strict regulations, floorspace limitations, growing demand and labour shortages have led manufactures to consider automation as a solution.

By understanding these challenges, ALPHR has been able to develop scalable, modular solutions that allow our clients to be more agile, increase production and reduce labour requirements.

Utilising automation correctly can improve efficiency by reducing footfall in existing production environments, creating space for expansion and new processes within existing facilities.

What benefits can automation offer in the HVAC sector?

Improving Efficiency by developing automation solutions that significantly reduce the time and effort required to perform repetitive, manual tasks, allowing employees to focus on more valuable and strategic activities. Increasing Productivity by ensuring our solution performs tasks faster and more accurately than humans, leading to increased productivity and output. Achieving Cost Savings through the development of automation and robotics to reduce labour costs, eliminate errors and rework, and optimise resource utilisation, leading to significant cost savings. Improving Quality by controlling the assembly process, using innovative technology and standardised processes to enable a reduction in errors and defects and improve the quality of our clients’ products or services. Enhancing Customer Experience by supplying automation that is flexible and adaptive, helping our clients respond faster and more accurately to customer requests, improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Better Decision-Making through the development of our real-time data analytics solutions and the use of traceability, enabling our clients to make more informed and data-driven decisions. Regulatory compliance by ensuring we understand our clients existing and future compliance, regulatory requirements and standards we can develop solutions that are adaptable and future proofed. Scalability and flexibility by supplying automated solutions that are scalable and flexible, enabling our clients to adapt to changing business needs, customer demands, and technological advancements. ALPHR has supplied a wide range of automation solutions to the HVAC sector, covering a multitude of products including domestic boilers, commercial boilers, air conditioning pumps and radiators, room thermostats, and Heat Interface Units (HIU). Our experience in hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen storage is offering additional benefits to our clients in HVAC. Regulatory changes and environmental concerns have driven the significant shift from gas boilers to hydrogen fuel, air source heat pumps and heat recovery units. ALPHR has supported many manufactures with the introduction of new products and the transition to new energies, providing assembly and End-of-Line testing solutions as well advise and support. ALPHR’s partnership with our sister companies, Vacuum Engineering Services and Nolek, has provided our clients with access to the world’s leading suppliers of Helium Leak Testing technology, enabling new leak detection to be seamlessly integrated with automation.

Automated Systems For The HVAC Sector

Typical automation solutions have included controlled assembly, automated screwdriving, vision inspection, automatic dispensing for sealants, leak and flow testing, and End-of-Line testing. But, it’s through constant development and innovation that ALPHR continues to support the HVAC sector. Helium sniffing is often used to search for leaks from joints, fittings, pipes, welds, something that has historically been a manual, time consuming process, suffering from a lack of positional accuracy of the sniffer and inconsistency of operators, resulting in potential failures reaching the supply chain. The development of ALPHR’s innovative Modular Helium Sniffing Cell uses robots to navigate the sniffing head around the exact path of a product, ensuring accurate and repeatable positioning at all times, resulting in a more accurate and reliable test results and removing the need for an operator. To ease the implementation of this technology, the path is simply created from CAD, reducing the client’s requirement for robot programming skills, allowing changes to be made easily and dramatically increasing the speed of factory integration. Manufacturing defects will still be possible, so our intuitive UI displays actual test results in real-time and importantly, shows where these leaks were detected. The option of UV marking allows the location of a leak to be non-permanently marked, reducing the time required for any rework by directly indicating the exact area of interest, removing the need for a rework operator to run the initial test. Traceability and data analysis enable our clients to use this valuable data for process improvements downstream. Please do contact us to find out more about how ALPHR can help.