IES Consulting-Helps deliver office with the highest ever BREEAM
score
IES Consulting is delighted to have worked closely
with King Shaw Associates as the building performance
analysts on the low energy Innovate Green Office project
at Thorpe Park, Leeds. The building, which has been
awarded the highest ever BREEAM score of 87.55%, opened
for business this month. It is a £5.5 million, 45,000sq
ft development of managed green offices for small,
medium and large sized businesses, and features many
novel techniques for reducing resource consumption and
CO2 emissions.
“The challenge for the design team was to prototype an
energy efficient building that would stand up to the
scrutiny of the institutional finding markets.” said the
architect Richard Roberts of RIO Architects.
The project team used a fresh design approach. An
engineering design exercise, led by King Shaw
Associates, produced an environmentally friendly and
commercially sustainable prototype building design which
was then applied to the specific plot at Thorpe Park.
IES Consulting, experts in building performance analysis
and simulation, were engaged to test and validate the
internal comfort conditions and energy performance of
the design. This gave assurance to the client and all
involved in the design process that the building would
offer the energy savings predicted and would still meet
the comfort and operational performance parameters
required.
IES Consulting used the highly acclaimed IES <Virtual
Environment> suite of integrated building simulation
software to achieve these results, undertaking dynamic
thermal, bulk airflow and daylight simulation studies.
It provided the expertise and tools required to gain an
integrated understanding of how the building performed
as a whole, and how the different elements interacted
within it.
In particular, IES Consulting undertook detailed studies
on the contribution of the Tarmac TermoDeck system to
the thermal performance of the building, requiring
special modelling of the heat exchange within the
TermoDeck slabs. This was of particular use to King Shaw
Associates, as it allowed the consultant to develop an
innovative plant operating strategy which utilised the
thermal storage capacity of the system to maximise plant
efficiency.
TermoDeck is a fan-assisted ventilation system that uses
the high thermal mass of structural, hollowcore concrete
slabs to warm or cool fresh air before it's distributed
into the room spaces of a building. In this case, using
the detail provided by IES Consulting, King Shaw
Associates was able to develop a system that used an
absorption chiller, fired by CHP and heat recovery AHUs
to store cooling energy in the Termodeck to be drawn on
at times of peak demand.
King Shaw Associates was also able to derive a novel
operating strategy for the BMS system through detailed
analysis of hourly thermal data exported from the IES
<Virtual Environment> simulation. This further analysis
revealed the inter-relationships between the different
heating and cooling loads and the capacity of the
building to store energy and was used to identify the
optimum operating times for the systems.
During the construction stages, as the design was fine
tuned and value engineered, IES Consulting was able to
keep the simulation up to date, allowing the Design Team
to make decisions informed by the building performance.
This helped ensure that the integrity of the building’s
performance was maintained without incurring unnecessary
extra costs on-site.
A striking commercial office building at the cutting
edge of sustainable design has been achieved. It
combines a standard developer specification with
extremely low carbon emissions, and all at a
commercially viable rate. Being one of the first
speculative, genuinely sustainable serviced office
buildings in the UK, the Innovate Green Office is a
benchmark for the future of serviced office
accommodation.
Accommodating a workforce of up to 420 the annual
emissions from the building services are predicted to be
less than 22KgCO2/m2, a reduction of over 80% compared
to a typical conventionally air conditioned office,
saving over 350 tonnes of CO2 per year. It also features
a raft of resource saving features and technologies.
”The contribution IES Consulting made to the project was
invaluable, it provided independent validation that our
design would work as predicted without committing to
bricks and mortar,” commented Doug King, Principal of
King Shaw Associates, the Environmental and Building
Services Consultants.
“This gave both the Client and the Contractor confidence
to proceed with what for them was a venture into
uncharted territory.”
“In an ideal world I would have liked to use the
<Virtual Environment> tool more fully to rationalise
different design options at feasibility stage, which I
believe could have added at least another 5% in
efficiencies.”
King Shaw Associates had previously been trialling the
IES <Virtual Environment> suite and following the
success of this project has purchased the software for
use in-house. “In my opinion the IES <Virtual
Environment> system provides an invaluable tool by which
we can evaluate the relative advantages of novel designs
without committing our clients to being guinea pigs.”
continued Doug King.
Email:
edwinac@thinktank.org.uk
Arundel Jones Associates Ltd
Hill Farm, Linton Hill, Maidstone, Kent ME17 4AL
Tel : 01622 745333
news@buildingdesign.co.uk
Registered in England and Wales No. 07334149
News Categories : Building performance analysts
|
Building
performance analysts
