Engineered for Performance.
Built for Reliability.

Standard paint booth design runs continuous downward airflow across the whole booth — fine at 7–8 metres, but at 62 metres it meant 250,000 CFM of treated air, ~2,000 tonnes of AC load, and an estimated ₹3 crore annual electricity bill.

We found three places the conventional design was wasting energy, and engineered around each:

Zoned airflow. Blades are painted in sections, not all at once — two painters move steadily from base to tip, so overspray only ever happens in one limited zone at a time. We split the booth into ten independently controlled zones, with only three running at high velocity at any moment. Result: a 70% cut in the active high-velocity footprint.

Waste-heat reheating. Humidity control normally requires reheating the air with fossil fuel. We routed waste heat recovered from the chillers into reheating instead, eliminating fuel demand and reusing energy that would otherwise be discarded.

Dynamic setpoint control. Most booths run a single fixed temperature, even though 18–26°C is acceptable. A fixed 22°C setpoint meant overcooling by ~162 tonnes on a 45°C summer day and overheating by ~568 kW on a 10°C winter day. We programmed the PLC to automatically pick the optimal setpoint within range based on real-time outside conditions — so the system never works harder than the process needs.

Phase 1 needed just 20 tonnes of cooling, too small to justify a water-cooled chiller system, yet it had to slot seamlessly into whatever solution would eventually serve the full school. Phase 2 would add roughly 200 tonnes of load, and Phase 3, still 3–4 years away, would need another 200 tonnes provisioned for in advance. Each phase had different usage patterns too: the Front and Back Offices would run 6 days a week from 8:30am to 5:30pm, while the rest of the school would operate 5 days a week, 8:30am to 2:30pm.

For Phase 1, we installed standalone ductable/split air conditioners for the Front Office, Back Office, and Reception — sized to the immediate need, without the cost or complexity of a chiller plant built for a school that didn't exist yet.

When Phase 2 began, we merged this standalone system into the water-cooled chiller plant being installed for the rest of the school: the existing indoor units from Phase 1 were reconnected to run off the new chillers, and a smaller air-cooled chiller was added to take over during off-hours and school holidays, when running the main plant would have been wasteful.

The result was a system that always matched its scale and efficiency to actual occupancy — water-cooled chillers during full school operation, a smaller air-cooled unit when the school was quiet, with Phase 3 already provisioned for in the original design.

Under normal conditions, ordering a new AHU would have taken two to three months. With lockdown restrictions choking procurement nationwide, even that timeline was no longer realistic. Replacing the AHU outright meant 10–15 days of lost production — and the client wasn't willing to shut down for even a single day, not when the new drug was urgently needed.

Two further complications stacked on top: the existing AHU delivered 100% fresh air to safely handle explosive VOCs from the original drug, and the site's coastal location meant humidity was a constant, elevated problem.

We started by questioning the assumption everyone was working around: did the new drug actually need 100% fresh air? It didn't. That single insight turned the existing AHU's high tonnage from a constraint into an asset — we modified it to recirculate air rather than continuously condition fresh air, absorbing the additional heat load with only minimal downtime.

That fix raised a new problem: the air change rate needed to meet cleanliness standards now exceeded what the modified airflow could deliver. The AHU's VFD made the answer straightforward — we increased fan speed to hit the required air changes, and confirmed through testing that power draw still sat comfortably within the unit's rated capacity.

The higher airflow then introduced a third issue: increased air velocity through the cooling coil was causing water carry-over. Here, the coil's original oversizing — designed for a higher latent load than this new application needed — worked in our favor again. We recalculated the air velocity across the coil and confirmed it stayed below the carry-over threshold, closing out the last open problem.

The office ran on two Air Handling Units: AHU1 near the reception entrance, and AHU2 positioned closer to the centre of the office. Each had developed its own set of problems, and both needed independent investigation to isolate the root causes.

Inspecting AHU1, we found its ducting connected directly to the unit without a canvas connection — the flexible joint meant to absorb vibration. Without it, vibration was transmitting straight into the ductwork and from there into the false ceiling and electrical fittings, amplifying noise throughout the space.

Compounding this, AHU1 was delivering far more air than the duct was designed for, pushing air velocity — and fan speed — well beyond what was needed. This was the direct source of the hissing, and it had also been quietly damaging the fan and motor bearings while consuming more power than necessary.

AHU2 had a different problem: its duct damper was closed more than 50%, artificially restricting airflow. This had the side effect of dampening AHU2's own noise, but it pushed the damper itself into an audibly turbulent state and was wasting roughly 2kW of power every hour in the process.

We recalibrated the entire air distribution system — correcting the pressure drop across the ductwork to match its designed flow, and resetting AHU1's fan speed to the speed actually required rather than the inflated speed it had been running at.