Peddling off to a good start
(by Oscar Hiscock & Millie Siu)
26th November 2018 - 7th December 2018
Week 1: NCC Section J, BESS Test and ASA Conference
Our internship kickstarted at SBE with Sean walking us through the NCC Section J, which is currently the regulatory backbone of the minimum environmental performance in buildings. This eventually led to the learning outcomes of our ability to determine compliant window to wall ratios using a glazing calculator, and to carry out STORM water assessments for various commercial projects.
Finishing our works with SBE on Tuesday night, we attended the ASA (Architectural Science Association) conference at RMIT on behalf of SBE for 4 full days to gather useful insights on the current building trends for the company. Topics ranged from architectural philosophy to construction materials and processes, with keynote presentations from the renowned architects Jan Gehl and Gill Garner. The conference offered a plethora of built environment based researches which calls for better designs, backed by detailed case studies and building users’ feedback. We believe studying these pieces of information all together will be insightful for the industry to address building users’ needs, to improve on current design flaws and to mitigate issues specific to the built environment such as the urban heat island effect.
We will be happy to share with you what we’ve learnt at the conference.
Week 2: 2 BESS test projects, IES daylight modelling
During our second week at SBE, we began conducting building assessments for various commercial projects through the BESS tool. Incorporating factors such as water use, energy and daylighting, we are able to provide a building performance rating for the client. However, as one of the buildings did not pass the ‘deemed to satisfy’ (DtS) requirement for daylighting, this led us to learning and modelling the building using IES software. As the building was 5 stories with varying floors, this model took some time and effort to compose, and is going to be run over the weekend so the results can be analyzed next week. Once the results are provided, we can finally add the data back into the BESS tool and submit the assessment to the client!
As well as learning BESS and IES over the last few days, Ainslie Unsworth took us to the Flagstaff Green development to shadow a weekly meeting, as well as tour the multi-story development to get an idea of what the construction sites look like in practice, a great experience!
We are enjoying our time at PTA so far, it’s been great to meet everyone and thanks for helping us feel welcome!
