Chilled beams deliver refurbishment cooling

Dadanco’s cassette active chilled beams are being installed to provide comfort cooling for the refurbishment of the 12-storey Redvers House project in Sheffield. This building dates from the early 1970s and is being refurbished to provide a very high standard of city-centre accommodation for Sheffield City Council. The work is being carried out two floors at a time while the rest of the building remains occupied. In providing cooling, the problems faced by FHP Consulting Engineers in Leeds included the integration of the design into such a tight building envelope while meeting the client’s strict internal design requirements. High installed loads are required with low noise levels. Each floor is supplied by its own air-handling unit mounted in the ceiling void. Space constraints limited the amount of air that could be supplied to about 1 m3/s, amounting to just over 2 l/s per square metre of floor area. As active chilled beams rely on this primary air to ‘drive’ the cooling process, a unit with extremely high performance was needed to deliver the 100 W/m2 of cooling needed in the space. Dadanco’s ACB40 units could achieve the design load using a 275 mm-high unit with the limited primary air available. The units are typically 1200 mm long by 600 mm wide and were selected to deliver up to 2300 W of sensible cooling. Some 1800 mm-long units were supplied to allow easy integration between light fittings. The overall effect is similar to fan-coil units. masmith@ukconnect.com