Servicing the dragon: the services strategy is ingenious, energy conscious and executed in record time.

The design of the airport's building services was a triumph of planning and execution on a scale probably not seen since the D-Day landings. When the Foster + Partners and Arup competition team was awarded the contract, they were given only around eight weeks to produce the design drawings.

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The Chinese project team's brief made it clear that they wanted the M&E systems to incorporate the latest technology, but that all the systems had to be proven. The Chinese project manager was an HVAC engineer who had been in charge of Beijing's Terminal 2, so the list of 'proven technologies' was agreed with the team in the first week. Under any other circumstances, the design of such a huge new airport terminal would have afforded opportunities to push the envelope for innovative technologies, but the programme and incredibly short timescale simply didn't allow this. To meet the eight-week deadline,Arup had engineers working around the world on three continents so that work progressed on a 24-hour basis, seven days a week.Arup had over 100 engineers in their London office working on the M&E design along with offices in the USA and Asia.

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What the Foster /Arup team has achieved in Beijing is a further refinement of the M&E services concept that began with Stansted and continued with Chek Lap Kok. Main plant is placed in the basement with vertical service towers rising up through the concourses to provide comfort control as well as housing electrical and public health systems. The first generation services towers at Stansted made a big impact with their distinctive 'palm-tree' shape housing integrated cooling, ventilation, lighting and electrical services. In Beijing, responding to a range of functional demands and the need to be designed and built quickly, the latest, highly evolved generation of service towers are less formally elaborate, but still modular in concept. The design team affectionately nicknamed them 'binnacles', an old nautical term for a box on the deck of a ship, generally mounted in front of the helmsman, in which navigational instruments are placed for quick and easy reference.

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The binnacles neatly contain all the services paraphernalia--air supply and return risers, VAV (variable air volume) boxes, jet diffusers, electrical risers, electrical panels, hose reels, PA speakers and CCTV-controlled water cannon to put out fires. The panels covering the steel frame are interchangeable throughout the terminal and extra features such as advertising boards can also be incorporated. Although they are modular, there are approximately 40 variations on the standard theme. In the UK the binnacles would have been prefabricated off-site, but because of China's much cheaper labour costs, they were all manufactured in situ.

Beijing's climate (hot, wet summers and cold, dry winters) shaped the decision to use a VAV system. With the availability of a 100 percent outside air economiser cycle, the climate allows free cooling for approximately half of the year. This represents a considerable energy saving. Carbon dioxide sensors in the return air inlets throttle back the amounts of fresh air intake in accordance with occupancy loads whenever the systems are not operating on an economiser cycle. Return air is drawn back from the concourse levels via the binnacles and exhaust air is discharged through the baggage-handling area, where it exfiltrates out through the many openings accommodating the beltways. The re-use of already cooled air to condition the baggage area provides a significant saving in energy.

Other energy-saving measures include natural ventilation in the car parking areas, which eliminates the use of mechanical ventilation fans, and facade openings to admit day lighting in the car park. The terminal's roof also neatly incorporates a strategy of daytime illumination and winter morning warm-up using solar energy via a series of raised flaps set at an angle to provide shading when the sun in intense, but also admitting natural light throughout the day.

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Issues of sustainability and renewable energy were discussed at the outset of the design. The use of wind turbines is not suitable for airport environments due to wind disruptions and the payback for photovoltaic systems was deemed too long by Chinese standards. But other technologies passed muster, such as a central sewage treatment plant providing grey water to the terminal, a green roof on the car park, U-values well beyond Chinese norms and externally shaded facades to reduce summertime solar gain. So although no new ground was broken, 'proven technologies' were incorporated into the ingenious binnacles and the systems save energy wherever possible. And the fact that over 2000 M&E drawings were produced in eight weeks, puts a remarkable achievement in perspective.

David Stillman is a services engineer and managing director of dsa Engineering.

Photographs: 1, 3 Dennis Gilbert/VIEW, and 2, courtesy of Foster + Partners