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Modern facilities for sports franchises seem to be a necessity these days--build one and keep the franchise, or stay in the old "barn" and wait for the team to be sold because owners cannot turn enough of a profit without (among other things) more seats and a full complement of luxury boxes. Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver all have projects well underway--the Canadiens new Montreal Forum, the Palladium for the Senators in Ottawa and General Motors Place, the shared new home of Vancouver's Canucks and the Grizzlies, a recent addition to the National Basketball Association.
And while excellent ice, lighting and a comfortable interior environment may not be the primary motivation for moving to a new facility, they are undoubtedly important to the success of a franchise: engineers involved in the mechanical and electrical design of the three new arenas have used various methods in their efforts to achieve comfort for occupants and easy, efficient and economical operation for building managers and owners.
At General Motors Place fans of the Vancouver Canucks and the fledgling Grizzlies will unwittingly become part of a simple cooling-load calculation that will keep the temperature at a comfortable level (72 to 75F) in the "bowl," which includes the playing surface and customer seating. No matter what the outdoor temperature, the heat generated by thousands of spectators will be balanced against the output of the stadium's computer-controlled air-conditioning and distribution plant to maintain that optimum temperature level.
This "cooling-intensive" priority makes GM Place comparable to any building in terms of energy efficiency, according to Len Farrant, P.Eng., manager of the mechanical design department at Domco Engineering Ltd., Vancouver, the mechanical engineering consultants on the project. "It's hard to imagine how it could be more efficient," he says.
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Key to this claim is the kind of cooling plant used, and how it is used. The cooling system will be activated about four hours in advance of any scheduled event, bringing the bowl temperature down to 68F. "There is a huge mass of concrete in this building, and we are going to use it when we need to," Farrant says. "We will sub-cool it when there is no heat load in the bowl, so that it will provide some cooling...