Design Journal Entry - Module 9

Your Design Journal entries for this module should highlight your design thinking and analysis results that influenced your decisions about:

• your overall HVAC system strategy
• Overall, I’m planning to use ducts to deliver required heating and cooling, to go with the industrial look of the exposed structural steel system.
• Due to my use of curtain walls for most of the building’s exterior, there will be less overall thermal resistance and a lot of solar exposure. This was reflected in the heating and cooling analysis that resulted in huge heating and cooling loads
• There is a good mixture of open spaces and enclosed (conference/office spaces)
• I definitely have more of a heating problem due to the project’s location (Copenhagen)
• I used a VAV system throughout the building, with an air handler unit assigned to each level. This decentralized approach helped me organize my duct layout.

• your heating strategy and how you implemented it in your design
• Trying to incorporate thermal mass by using concrete floors
• Definitely tried to incorporate shading into the design, to use as much of the passive design as possible
• Difficult to use heat exchanger in extreme cold due to the lack of heat to pull from the outside air to the inside

• your cooling strategy and how you implemented it
• Used a VAV system.
• Also, as mentioned in the heating portion, the use of shade and some type of glass that would let light in but less radiation.

• any special HVAC system challenges that you encountered
• It was rough laying out the ducts and connecting to the air terminals, especially on the first and some of the second floor, but once I got the hang of it, the process became simpler and cleaner. I was able to complete the third and fourth floors well.
• As mentioned above, it was difficult to efficiently use a heat exchanger in the really cold weather, due to the lack of heat available to transfer from the outside to the inside.
• Also, it was a little tricky to figure out the layout, at first, of the duct work due to the circular shape of my building.
• The heating and cooling loads for my building are just too much. I’ll be addressing this in my final poster and journal, but we can tell by the number of air terminals that the heating and cooling demands are too much.