Designing Buildings for Hot and Cold

This article is adapted from content featured in the upcoming inaugural issue of Agenda, the Technical Journal for Building Engineering at AECOM. To subscribe, contact Helen Elias.

One of the chief concerns of building engineers is the design of systems that regulate the internal climate of a building. The requirements of these systems vary depending upon the external climate of the local geography. Often, the efficiency of these heating and cooling systems has an impact on the global climate through the consumption of fossil fuels and the emission of greenhouse gasses. From the intense heat of the Middle East, to the relative cool of the United Kingdom, to the extreme cold of the South Pole, AECOM engineers have devised some novel ways to adapt buildings to their local climates and regulate internal temperatures with less of an impact on the planet's climate.

For a mixed-use, 30-story tower in the Gulf Region, the objective was to keep the 1,500 sq m floors cool through passive design, dramatically reducing the building's carbon footprint. Computer modeling played a key role in selecting a double-helix design for the building that would literally shade itself, maximizing daylight while minimizing direct solar gain on the building envelope. The upper surfaces of the spiral are further maximized for direct solar impact and are laced with photovoltaics. This building is projected to reduce its carbon output by 40 percent compared with a comparable building using a more conventional design.

When the University of Nottingham's Jubilee Campus added three new buildings, they became exemplars in minimizing energy consumption through the use of a primary services plant and innovative structural and façade design. All heating and cooling for these buildings is generated by highly efficient stainless steel heat exchangers submerged in the nearby lake. Sun pipes fill interior spaces with daylight without contributing to solar heat gains. Engineered to reduce heating and cooling loads, high-performance facades double as modern architecture.

When the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) planned to replace its Antarctic research facility Halley V with a new Halley VI, the engineering challenges had less to do with keeping the buildings warm and more to do with the ever-present environmental factor of the South Pole: snow. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) helped engineers determine how the shape of the buildings would affect snow accumulations that form quickly around any object or building and pose a hazard to people living and working there. Taking these factors into account, the AECOM design team won a BAS competition with a model for a long train of buildings that stand off of the ground on skis. Construction of this singular facility began in 2007 and has continued through 2009.

To learn more about these and other engineering innovations, subscribe to Agenda.

Jake Herson