As a colourful addition to Carshalton College, ‘The Mavis Peart
Building’ is a new learning centre for people with learning
difficulties, the first to be opened in Sutton. The facility offers
a purpose built education centre for young people and adults with
special education needs, teaching essential life skills such as
social skills and independent use of public transport.
The new three-story building was named ‘The Mavis Peart Building’,
in recognition of the dedicated work by Mavis Peart OBE, who was
instrumental in bringing the project to life.
The Mavis Peart Building will accommodate up to 80 learners each
year offering academic and vocational courses to students with a
broad range of needs, including those with an autistic spectrum
disorder. Facilities of this type are rare in the UK, meaning that
people with profound learning difficulties often attend a specialist
residential college outside of their local community, a great
distance from the family home.
The three storey building is provided with mixed mode cross flow
ventilation fed through automated windows on one side of the
classroom, and interfaced with low energy VAV ducted extract via
modulating dampers on the other. The window and damper positions are
controlled with temperature, CO2, wind and rain sensors. Underfloor
heating is installed in each classroom and interfaced into the
natural ventilation controls to minimise energy waste, ensuring
windows and dampers do not open for temperature control while there
is heating demand.
There are four top hung open out Velfac windows in each of the 11
classrooms. The windows are each fitted with a single SE Controls’
TGCO 24 30 chain actuator, using bespoke brackets to suit the frame
profile and materials and catering for the unusual pivot stays of
these windows. The actuator flexes are concealed behind the
dry-lined reveal to a junction box located above the ceiling grid.
As always, the occupants don’t notice any noise from the window
automation within a week or two of occupation.
Each classroom is provided with an OS2 control panel located in the
adjacent storeroom. These provide power and digital control inputs
from the room’s combined CO2 and temperature sensor. When the indoor
conditions exceed the system setpoints, windows gradually open in
small increments, with suitable delays in between, until the
classroom environment improves. Each classroom is provided with a
teacher’s key-operated manual override switch giving an hour
uninterrupted override. A central ‘whole system’ kill switch allows
for simple holiday or engineer lock down.
Each of the OS2 control panels are linked to a LON network via an
OS2 OSLON board. Coupled into the network is a rain sensor, wind
speed and direction sensor and outdoor temperature sensor located on
the roof feeding weather data into the system.
These sensors along with an occupancy time clock allow a night time
ventilation strategy to be enabled; this allows excess heat to be
expelled during summer nights and coolth to be stored in the high
thermal mass the building offers, giving extended thermal comfort
during the day. An allied strategy of early morning fresh air purge
flushes the building with fresh air for a few minutes before the
students & staff arrive in the morning, giving a more invigorating
start to the day. Should the wind speeds reach nuisance levels on
the glazed elevation, the windows are gradually closed to prevent
annoying draughts or damage to the windows. The completed system
offers a battery back-up in case of a power outage to ensure safety
and security of the building.
The College’s Facilities Management team can monitor the system
remotely anywhere on campus, using any of their own networked
computers, due to a password protected webserver that provides a
real-time dynamic graphic user interface. This also allows setpoints
to be adjusted for each room and for the various strategies, to suit
the special needs of the different student groups, some of whom are
highly active and others very sedentary. Indeed the Facilities Team
could use standard off-site vpn logins to access the system from
anywhere on the internet at no extra cost. SE Controls offer a
complete service of design, installation, commissioning and
maintenance of smoke and adaptive natural ventilation control
systems for any building.
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