A Creative Heating and Cooling Solution
at Narellan Cinemas
Like many localities more than 20 km away from the coast, Narellan, on the south western fringe of Sydney, provides challenging ambient conditions for air conditioning design. With a recorded ambient range of -6 C to +45C and a specification requiring up to 100% outside air, the air conditioning design for the new Narellan cinema complex required creative design.
The recently-opened cinema complex at Narellan Town Centre is a crucial part of the centre’s $25 million, stage four, upgrade. Boasting eight screens, the cinema complex is designed to service the region’s rapidly growing population. Temperzone and consultants ABACUS Engineering tackled the project side-by-side. Temperzone NSW sales engineer Stuart Battle and ABACUS Engineering’s Peter Brown provided Temperzone News with the low-down.
The biggest design issue was how to best deal with the extreme ambient range combined with the high people load which required up to 100% outside air.
The units were originally designed and selected at 39.4C ambient. In conjunction with ABACUS Engineering it was decided to rate the units for 45C ambient to ensure operation in extreme summer heat.
The very low winter ambient required a totally different approach. Due to the high rate of outside air ventilation, the de-icing cycle would produce sudden lowering of supply air temperature within the cinemas. To overcome this, heating is an entirely gas fired “hydronic” system with heating coils within each Temperzone fan coil unit.
With gas readily available a boiler was the best heating option. Temperzone has its own coil manufacturing plant, so we were able to design and build the hot water heating coils into the units, avoiding the difficulties of in duct installation.
The air conditioning units were located on a large roof platform with a louvre enclosure. A combination of standard and opposite hand supply and return air units were located within the enclosure. Units included hot gas by-pass, smaller evaporator fan motors to suit lower air flows (because of full outside air), while all units included head pressure controllers.
We extended the existing “Trend BMSC” control system to cover Stage 4 (the cinema and food court), an economy cycle was added to further reduce costs. The system design also allows units to be run only for those cinemas actually in use.
This cleverly designed hybrid system gave the Narellan cinema complex the ideal mix of economy combined with the capability to cope with high people load in a wide range of ambient conditions.
