Experts from IES Consulting help Glasgow City Council evaluate school tenders for environmental performance and occupant comfort.

Taking a unique approach to the verification assessment of tender returns for its school modernisation programme, Glasgow City Council chose to actively evaluate the performance of the designs themselves, rather than settling for proof provided by bidders that they met the required criteria. Wishing to create an effective education environment for pupils and teachers the Council put special emphasis on ensuring that good ventilation and natural light was provided in the most energy efficient manner possible.

To do this they employed the help of Glasgow based building performance simulation consultants, IES Consulting. The Council utilised the company’s expertise during both the selection process, and afterwards to work with the preferred bidder’s technical team on the discussion and enhancement of the designs. This approach by Glasgow City Council not only ensured that the best option was chosen but also enabled the council to work with the preferred bidder in looking at ways to further enhance their submitted design.

Glasgow City Council’s Development and Regenerations Services (DRS) department recognised the potential of the company’s expertise and software to help the Council deliver its vision of 21st Century classrooms – learning environments which are orientated to sustain natural daylight, provide excellent air quality and are energy efficient.

Looking at natural ventilation, daylight levels, artificial lighting control, carbon dioxide levels and occupant thermal and visual comfort, IES Consulting scored each tender submitted during bid appraisals to an agreed matrix set by the Council. Compliance with Building Bulletin 87, which has now been superseded for ventilation by Building Bulletin 101, was also tested and taken into consideration.

This integrated performance assessment was used by Glasgow City Council to check the school designs met the basic requirements expected and to help them select the successful bidder. Glasgow City Council wanted to take a holistic approach with these projects, one where the needs of the occupants were considered alongside the balance sheets and fuel bills with equal importance. It was clear that an integrated software approach was the best way to assess against these criteria.

David McEwan, Director IES Consulting commented: “It was fantastic for us to be asked to take part in this project as it really uses the capabilities of our software to the full. A recent CABE report stated that nearly all schools failed to tackle basic environmental issues, such as providing natural daylight and ventilation and we really commend Glasgow City Council for their visionary approach to tackling this. They really understood what our company and software could offer and had the courage to embrace what is still a new concept in building design wholeheartedly. Here at IES we really believe that this integrated approach to building design right from the early stages is the only way to intelligently consider environmental and occupant comfort issues.”

Three bidders submitted tenders for this particular project, the construction of four new primary schools in Glasgow on a design and build basis. Avenue End Primary School was used by IES Consulting as the exemplar school for all the bidders. Other schools in the project included Antonine Primary School, St. Rose of Lima Primary School and Wallacewell Primary School.

IES worked with the bidders to transfer their 3D architectural designs for the school into the IES <Virtual Environment> ModelBuilder, which can easily be used with existing CAD systems. At the centre of the IES <Virtual Environment>, this Integrated Data Model is shared by all the building performance assessment applications in the suite and allows the integrated assessment of the different criteria in relation to each other. IES Consulting undertook detailed analysis of these models; assessing daylight, artificial lighting control, temperature and ventilation ranges as required by Glasgow City Council, to meet their stipulated criteria.

Following the appointment of Barr as the preferred bidder, IES Consulting’s role developed into one of guidance and mentoring, helping their design team work with IES’s software to discuss and enhance the original design. This was because analysis by IES Consulting during stage one of the project had identified that there were areas where the design could easily be tweaked to make it a more comfortable environment for its occupants while at the same time maintaining energy performance.

Primarily this was around the development of a cross-flow natural ventilation solution, intended to reduce overheating therefore improving temperature based comfort and reducing carbon dioxide levels to improve air quality. This was particularly challenging as the needs of classrooms throughout the building had to be taken into consideration regardless of their position in fully utilising the cross-flow solution. In addition, an understanding of how natural daylight levels were affected by any changes made was also required in order to optimise overall environmental conditions.

Since undertaking this project with IES Consulting, Glasgow City Council has decided to purchase and train its DRS technical staff on the IES <Virtual Environment> so that it could perform the same types of assessments going forward. The Council purchased modules which would enable them to undertake heat loss and gain, thermal simulation, ventilation, daylighting and solar shading analyses.

Email: edwinac@thinktank.org.uk