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Home 9 2020 9 University Stellenbosch Bellville Business School Campus

Client Name

Stellenbosch University

Project Value

R17.3m

Project Completion

2020

Services

Design, Documentation, Construction

Project Description

The Business School Campus is situated in Bellville and consists of 3 buildings. As part of the project, the main building was upgraded with additional lecture hall capacity as well as a new cafeteria. The building is an existing facility consisting of 4 floors. The first 2 floors house the lecture rooms and cafeteria while the rest of the floors house offices.

The project scope included upgrading the entire HVAC system to a chilled water system utilising the local lake water for pre-cooling of air. All air-handling units were installed externally to ensure maintenance can be done without entering the building. The HVAC installation consists of new chilled water air-handling units with supply and return air installations. New ducting, chilled water, hot water piping and diffusers were also installed. The system is a variable air volume system, and a new electronic building management system was installed to control the HVAC installation from the university facilities management offices.

The project scope also included making the building fire safety compliant. The fire installations included alterations to the firewater installation, fire detection, fire curtains, fire sealing, system integration and lifts. Passive fire system design formed part of the project.

Unique Features and Challenges

  • HVAC systems to lecture halls had to be low noise. This had to be done in an existing building utilising existing plant rooms with limited space.
  • The chilled water system is innovative in that it uses lake water from a nearby old quarry as a primary cooling source. Each air-handling unit is fitted with 2x coils, ie pre-cooling and chilled water / heating water coil.
  • Chilled water quality in the new systems had to be similar or better than existing before connections to existing could be made. This required filtering the chilled water through various stages.
  • Working on the entire building while lectures and normal activities were proceeding as normal.
  • Adding fire safety measures to an existing, old building.