The Company

Cooper & Company is undertaking the development of Britomart Precinct which will see 17 heritage buildings renovated and 6 new buildings emerge to create a new precinct incorporating a variety of retail, lifestyle, commercial and residential uses. 
Coffey Projects is a world leader in project management, boasting one of the largest and most knowledgeable pools of project management specialists.

The Challenge

Cooper & Company is currently developing the site above the eastern end of the Britomart train station. Part of this project involves enclosing the existing exhaust towers in new buildings resulting in significant changes to the design of the exhaust stacks. These alterations included reductions in cross-sectional area, an extension in length, the inclusion of an offset in the duct plus the inclusion of a structural beam across the duct. 

The Solution

Matrix was commissioned to investigate the effect these design changes would have on losses in the duct to ensure that the existing fans would meet extraction requirements. Additionally, the client required shape sensitivity studies on the aerodynamic fairing encasing the structural beam.

Due to the number of complicated interacting flow features it was not possible to perform a reliable loss estimate with standard calculations and data tables. Therefore the system was modelled using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) using Star CCM+; a momentum and energy coupled finite volume code. CFD is a well known numerical technique used extensively in power, process, aerospace and automotive industries.

The Result

In this study, CFD analysis provided the following benefits to the project:

• Quantitative assessment of pressure losses in the existing and proposed ducts
• Reduced risk that the proposed new design would not perform to requirements
• Confidence in the beam fairing design
• Improved understanding of the existing and proposed exhaust ducts

To learn more about Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) click here.