Engineers lend their skills

By Patrick McDonagh

“It has been like raising a baby from birth through childhood, then the teenage years with all its problems, and now to adulthood.”

That’s Osama Moselhi, a professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, describing the new Integrated Engineering, Computer Science and Visual Arts Complex. The building is nearing completion on Ste. Catherine St. between Guy and Mackay Sts.

Moselhi, a specialist in construction engineering and management, has served on the project committee since the late 1990s. As the building grew, he was part of the team monitoring its progress.

Professor Ted Stathopoulos, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and an expert on wind engineering and building aerodynamics, carried out several studies for the building’s architects and engineers.

The City of Montreal requires that new tall buildings be subject to a wind study; in fact, Stathopoulos was instrumental in drafting those guidelines.

Tall buildings can create harsh wind environments. Wind speed increases with altitude, so winds at the tops of tall buildings are significantly stronger than those at street level. This wind-speed difference creates the high winds familiar to pedestrians walking between tall buildings.

Stathopoulos has a wind tunnel lab on the second floor of rented space at Ste. Catherine and Guy. There, his research team constructed a model of the building and its surroundings to test wind conditions from various directions.

“Buildings today are rarely box structures; they have many different configurations,” Stathopoulos said. “The new building will have different levels, canopies or other features to dissipate strong winds before they hit the sidewalk. Trees and statues can also make a difference.”

Then there’s the challenge presented by snowstorms, which could dump huge amounts of snow in inconvenient places such as the entrance. Stathopoulos is able to predict where there is likely to be a greater snow deposit, and again the building designers have taken these predictions into account.

The third and most difficult test involves the dispersion of exhaust. The new complex houses engineering labs and visual arts facilities that use foul-smelling chemicals. “In the past, people would just erect huge chimney stacks on top of the building, but architects don’t like these ugly things and want to keep them from being seen from the street level.”

Stathopoulos and his students performed tests in the wind tunnel with inert trace gases emitted from tiny mock-ups of the building’s exhaust system, and measured gas concentrations at various intervals and locations to indicate where the exhaust is going.

One of the building’s outstanding features is its “green-ness.” Andreas Athienitis, another professor in Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering, worked with colleague Fariborz Haghighat and a team of graduate students to create a design that is environmentally sustainable and welcoming to the building’s users.

Oslo conference

The analysis, along with Athienitis’s proposals, garnered plenty of attention. It was one of five plans selected to represent Canadian initiatives at an international conference on sustainability in Oslo in 2002.

Many of these recommendations were incorporated into the building, including plans for increased natural light and a mixture of natural and forced ventilation. However, the idea of placing photovoltaic panels on the façade of the building, as a means of generating solar power to help run the facility, was not adopted.

Peter Bolla, the executive director of Facilities Management, explained, “We’re just not quite at that stage yet. The technology for the solar panels on the curtain walls is still quite experimental, and has not progressed enough for mass production. The cost would have been prohibitive.”

Solar energy research is focused on developing technologies for buildings that will be built five to 20 years from now.

“This is probably one of the best university buildings in Canada,” Athienitis said. “One of the objectives of our research is to push Canada to catch up with the Japanese and Europeans.”

The building will house Engineering & Computer Science’s interdisciplinary research faculty and most of its research labs, which makes it fitting that this collaboration between planners, architects and academics was part of the building process.

Bolla is pleased with the way construction has gone, and looks forward to the next phase. “It takes about a year to get all the kinks out of a new space. It’s just like moving into a new house — there will be adjustments, although we try to catch most of them before people move in.”

To Athienitis, “operation is another very important phase, and we will have quite a few projects to study. The building will be a living laboratory, and its indoor environment can continuously be improved.

“If we didn’t get involved in our own building, what sort of engineering professors would we be?”

A longer version of this article appeared in the December issue of Concordia University Magazine.