Feringa Building, Groningen: 21 cabinets treat approximately one million kilograms of air per hour

With 64,000 m2 of floor space, Feringa Building will be one of the largest and most impressive university buildings in the Netherlands. The design provides for numerous state-of-the-art facilities. Moreover, the sustainability ambitions are high. AL-KO Luchttechniek's air handling units are an excellent match for this.

AL-KO Luchttechniek specializes in professional air and climate control. Following the motto 'Quality for life', this company, based in Roden, has been advising, designing and supplying well thought-out, reliable and efficient air treatment concepts for over 25 years. A customized concept was also developed for Feringa Building. "Commissioned by De Groot-Lammerink Installatiecombinatie B.V. and the RUG, we are supplying 21 identical air handling units, with a total air volume of 840,000 m3/h," says ing. Anne Rozema, director of AL-KO Luchttechniek. "One m3 of air weighs about 1.2 kilograms, which means that per hour more than one million kilograms of air are passed through the filters, cross-flow exchangers, heating/cooling elements, air ducts and other installation components. To make this possible requires a bit of higher math. In our design, we explicitly looked for ways to keep the resistance of the elements as low as possible. We then selected the best-fit fans and motors with the highest efficiency, thus securing very favorable Life Cycle costs."

Adiabatic cooling

During the design of the air handling units, AL-KO Luchttechniek used Arcadis' specifications as a starting point and optimized where possible, says Rozema. "A key requirement was the integration of adiabatic cooling. As a heat recovery element, we included in our air handling units a double polypropylene (plastic) plate exchanger, with a very high heat recovery efficiency. In summer, this plate exchanger is used as an indirect adiabatic cooler. The return air extracted from Feringa Building is humidified with treated water, lowering its temperature. The cooled return air is then passed through the plate exchanger, where it crosses the freshly drawn outside air. Thanks to this technique, this outside air can be cooled efficiently and in two stages. In theory, a temperature reduction of the outside air of up to about 8°C is possible, depending on the relative humidity in the building. This offers great advantages in the hot summer months, as it allows significant savings in mechanical cooling capacity."

High quality anti-corrosion coating

Because you sometimes have to deal with slightly contaminated air in laboratory environments, AL-KO Luchttechniek provides all air handling units with a high-quality anti-corrosion coating. "This protects the cabinets and all the components," says Rozema, who concludes by citing the structural constraints: "All our air handling units are designed to meet the structural constraints. The cabinets are delivered just-in-time to the project and lifted by crane to the top floor, after which the roof is built over them. To protect the cabinets from weather during construction, they are carefully sealed before delivery." The last cabinets will be delivered in 2024.