SUSTAINABLE BUILDING
NEW FACULTY LEADS WAY FOR SUSTAINABILITY
W
ith the new Faculty of Business and Law at De Montfort University (DMU) in line for confirmation on
completion of its design stage BREEAM Excellent rating, this landmark building demonstrates how sustainable design principles can be successfully designed and applied in a city centre location. The brand new £35m Hugh Aston Building forms a gateway to the De Montfort University campus from the city centre. It is notable not only as an important seat of learning, but also for the state of the art building services, designed by Pick Everard for optimum sustainability and energy efficiency. The 16,000m2
building features
lecture theatres, classrooms, meeting rooms, academic offices, a mock courtroom, library and IT facilities, together with an impressive atrium and winter gardens allowing in air and natural light.
A BREEAM Excellent rating at the design and pre-construction stage is a demonstration of the quality and sustainability of a building in terms of management, health and wellbeing, energy, water, transport, materials, land use, ecology and pollution perspective. Pick Everard first began designing building services for the Faculty of Business and Law at the end of 2006, with an in-house team that included Building Services Engineering Director John Thompson, Associate Mechanical Engineer Stephen Howe, Sustainability & Thermal Modelling Specialist Jose Hernandez, Electrical Engineer Farook Hussein and Mechanical Engineer Donald McKenzie. The team worked closely with the DMU Estates team, Midlands-based CPMG Architects, structural engineers BWB Consulting and building services contractor NG Bailey who effectively implemented the design.
Guided by energy conservation principles, the building incorporates a low carbon design, employing low energy solutions minimising load and operation of building services plant and systems, with natural ventilation, lighting and automatic energy saving controls. Pick Everard engineers carried out detailed thermal modelling and simulation exercises before developing and agreeing a building services strategy to meet DMU’s requirements.
Stephen Howe from architectural and engineering consultancy Pick Everard outlines how a sustainable building services strategy was developed for DMU’s new faculty building and applied in practice.
The building was designed to use natural and hybrid ventilation techniques where possible. Sustainable features included closed loop ground source heat pumps, adiabatic cooling to air handling units, air-heat recovery techniques utilising thermal wheels, run around coils, plate heat exchangers, invertor driven fans/pumps, rainwater harvesting and recycling for WC flushing, solar-tracker hot water collectors to satisfy partial hot water demand, high performance solar glazing, extensive use of daylight sensors to reduce artificial lighting and artificial lighting control linked to the availability of daylight. To address the energy strategy, mechanical services were designed using results from IES Virtual Environment thermal modelling software. This approach ensured the building’s energy demand was assessed carefully so that the most cost effective and energy efficient design solutions could be developed. The integration of renewable energy was explored during the design process and all the differing technologies assessed for feasibility including ground source heat pumps and ground water cooling, biomass, solar thermal and wind power. Ground source heat pumps were chosen instead of biomass boilers as supply of biomass would also have proved difficult in terms of access and storage Ground source heat pumps are capable of serving both the heating and cooling demands of the building and the scheme Pick Everard designed provides heating and cooling simultaneously as is required for different areas of the building and has the potential to reduce CO2 estimated 55 tonnes.
emissions by an
Use of cold water was limited by using recycled rainwater from a separate harvested rainwater tank for WC flushing and by installing flow limiting devices where appropriate, to be topped up with mains cold water after prolonged periods of little or no rainfall.
A solar hot water collector system comprising two number arrays tracking the movement of the sun was also incorporated providing an estimated 75%
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increase in energy output compared to conventional systems. The system, mounted on the flat roof area should deliver an estimated 26% of total hot water demand.
Pick Everard generated a building model for analysis of day lighting and focussing on open plan office areas, the atrium and perimeter offices. Solar shading was taken into account in the daylighting analysis to estimate daylight penetration. Two Daylight Factors were used as a reference. A Daylight Factor (DF) lower than 2% indicated areas where daylighting would contribute but where there was also a frequent need for artificial lighting. Areas with a DF higher than 4% would be generally well lit by natural daylight and only occasionally require artificial lighting, the design of which would make the most of lighting control and dimming opportunities. At the initial design stage, the building’s annual energy use was estimated at 1312 MWh, with the contribution from the renewable energy systems representing an impressive 13.6% of energy use. The individual contribution from the ground source heat pump is 12.5% and that of the solar tracker collector 1.1%, a CO2
saving of 8 tonnes.
The efficient design of the building itself pushes up the performance of the building to a predicted 10.2% CO2
reduction,
relative to 2006 Building Regulations.
Tel: 0116 223 4400 www.pickeverard.co.uk
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