Latest CO2 refrigeration technology

Alder Hey has built a new children’s hospital in a park, with a sustainable design inspired by children. Alder Hey is one of Europe’s busiest children’s hospitals – caring for over 275,000 young people and their families every year and has created a brand new sustainable hospital.

The majority of patients (75%) will be in single rooms rather than wards, each with a window that can be opened out into the park. Each floor also has an outdoor balcony overlooking the park. “It’s one thing to look at something out the window, it’s another to actually be able to experience it yourself,” says David Powell, the trust’s project director.

The grass of the park also continues, seamless, up over the curving roofs of the building itself; three main sections of the building reaching out like fingers into the park, creating valleys. The green roof is not just to enhance its green credentials – Alder Hey will be one of the most sustainable hospitals ever built with 60% of its energy-generated onsite, rain water-capture systems and a renewable heating plant.

This sustainable focus also reaches into the area of refrigeration with the latest CO2 refrigeration technology being designed and installed by Green Cooling directly for the main contractor Laing O’Rourke.

A high specification food service and pharmacy refrigeration system was required in order to match both the projects sustainability demands and also to meet the demands of the BREEAM environmental assessment.

The refrigeration design was relatively complex and required a complete system based approach in terms of both cooling delivery and energy transfer via a central CO2 refrigeration plant and two individual CO2 packaged units. A multi-compressor packaged system was configured to satisfy the main refrigeration load in order to provide both efficiency and contingency benefits within both chilled and freezer outputs. In terms of installation, the project duration ran over a ten-month period, which included cold store construction, the installation of pipework, electrics/controls, refrigeration systems and the installation of the packaged refrigeration plant. This project typifies how refrigeration is now quickly moving forward into a new era of sustainability and efficiency by utilising CO2, which is one of our oldest natural refrigerants to create cooling systems that meet the highest environmental standards that are demanded in 2015.

Dave Blinkhorn Green Cooling’s technical director commented: “We have designed and installed many CO2 refrigeration systems within UK Hospitals. The sustainable credentials of the natural refrigerant CO2 rate very highly within a BREEAM assessment, plus the efficiency of a CO2 refrigeration systems also fits extremely well within applications where achieving a high level of energy efficiency is a priority”.