As society’s awareness of its impact on local ecosystems grows to a realisation of the global impacts of climate change and the continued and rapid destruction of habitats, diversity and the planet’s interdependent networks of life, Design to Value offers the opportunity to respond with purpose and adequacy.
It's inefficient because you can only put ductwork in certain areas, as people cannot be required to step over it as they move around the space.Worse, because of the way ductwork is made, the extraction actually takes place about 15cm from the floor, which would allow the cold nitrogen to completely miss the extraction and bleed out into the room..
So we designed a trench system, covered with a grille, to surround all the critical areas, and we extract the air from the trench.Any nitrogen is pulled into the trench by the extraction (we’re extracting the air from the whole space through the trench), but also by gravity because it’s heavier than air.It seems almost obvious, but because it was a groundbreaking MEP design , we did comprehensive testing and modelling to make sure it would work, using computational fluid dynamics (a digital way of predicting how air will move through a building).
GSK – quite rightly – have a very strong Health and Safety culture, so the testing threshold was incredibly high.But the system passed, we installed it and it’s working very well.. Also in Stevenage, we worked with GSK on the lab grade water system.
They had a very large system, which had been put in 20 years ago.
They wanted to analyse how much of its capacity was used and when, and what its overall condition was.This is something else we’re looking at – or designing the mechanical and electrical engineering systems in new office buildings so that they are flexible enough to change usage later.
Obviously, there’s a challenge in thinking about ceiling heights and so on, but mostly the complexity is around air exchange.In an office, you aim for one and a half air changes per hour, whereas with laboratories, because they've got lots of safety cabinets and other devices, we have to look at 10, 15 or even 20 changes an hour in some places.
So the ductwork has to be 10 times as big, and the risers 10 times as big to carry the air up and down, and so on.Designing in flexibility presents lots of interesting challenges.. Master planning and MEP Design for a precious metals refinery.
(Editor: Silent Watches)