–Camden Council building | Hitachi chiller project in London, UK
CHILLER
The place: one of UK’s greenest buildings with a BREEAM’s Outstanding award
Part of the vast redevelopment of the King‘s Cross and Saint Pancras area in the heart of London, a green office building constructed in 2014 accommodates the headquarters of the London Borough of Camden.
A total floor area of 22,500m2 features eleven floors of offices for council workers, two swimming pools, a leisure center, customer service area, café and public library. The building has received, amongst many green building recognitions, highest rated BREEAM Bespoke building in the UK, with an outstanding score of 97.5%.
During the design phase of the building, the target was set to achieve carbon emissions 50% lower than the 2010 Building Regulation.
To meet the ambitious goals, the building includes a variety of passive features, such as sophisticated systems to optimize the sunlight for heat and light without generating overloads in heating or lighting. A highly efficient ventilation system was installed, and for heating the building was connected to low-carbon district heating system.
The solution: Hitachi modular chiller system exceeds the design’s performance target
Cooling of the building was particularly challenging, “The Part-L compliance dynamic thermal model set a seasonal efficiency target of 4.9 SEER on a total building cooling load of 2.2MW, divided over two air-cooled chiller units” the CISBE Journal reported. The solutions proposed in the UK market at the time, did not meeting the requirements.
“As the key technology that helped achieve the (BREEAM) ratings, I would pinpoint probably the chillers”
Alex Drysdale, Operations Director, Grontmij Ltd Engineering Consultancy on BREEAM website (watch video)
Looking outside of the UK, the Hitachi RCME series of air-sourced modular screw chillers were found. Each chiller unit delivers great efficiency, with an SEER of 5.31, notably due to its twin plate heat exchangers. However, the most interesting advantage of the chiller was the possibility to combine multiple units into a large modular system with primary/secondary control logic, so that the cooling capacity could be continuously adjusted to exactly meet any cooling load, up to 2,240 kW.
After consideration, 14 modules of 60HP were chosen to fit in the space available. The system’s minimal cooling capacity was set to be as low as 40 kW, minimizing the energy consumption when cooling demand is low.
The chiller played an important role in contributing to the significant annual energy savings, predicted at £500,000 annually. This enabled more money to be spent on adding swimming pools and other public amenities to the building for the use of Camden residents.
Primary (M) and Secondary (S) modular control configuration
Architects: Bennetts Associates
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Location
London, UK
Project
New built
Date of installation
2014
Total System Capacity
840HP
Product installed
Modular screw chiller RCME
Outdoor units
14
Architects
Bennetts Associates
