Blue Cross Animal Hospital use Moducel
Special Moducel LKS Air Handling Units from Eaton-Williams are playing a key role in the environmental control system serving the country’s oldest and latest animal hospital.
Opened recently by Her Majesty The Queen, the completely rebuilt Blue Cross
Animal Hospital in Hugh Street, Victoria, London SW1, marks an historic milestone
in the history of animal welfare.
The Blue Cross Charity has operated a hospital on this site since 1906, providing free veterinary treatment for animals, whose owners are on benefit or low income.
The re-building and modernisation programme costing some £4-million was funded entirely by voluntary donations. In recognition of the work carried out by Lord Sheppard of Didgemere as Appeal Chairman the new building bears his name.
Sheppard House is a three storey building with a total area of some 900m²,
incorporating reception and clinical examination areas on the ground floor,
three state-of-the-art operating theatres for surgical procedures on the first
floor and an administration area on the second floor. Kennels to accommodate
animals needing to be boarded for observation, or recuperation are located
at back of the building – complete with piped music to soothe the more
nervous patients! Open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year the new hospital building
is expected to handle over 25,000 consultations each year.
Mechanical ventilation
The Building Services system for Sheppard House was designed by Engineering Design Consultants (EDC) to provide mechanical ventilation for the lower two floors of the building. Moducel LKS Air Handling Units were installed to meet supply and extract requirements – one located in the main plant room on the ground floor to serve the reception area and examination rooms and the other two, serving the surgical section and kennels, located in a dedicated plant room on the second floor.
The Moducel units located on the second floor feature an unusual design. Air supplies to both the surgical suite and the animal accommodation areas are cooled without an independent packaged chiller. The air handling units have been designed as complete integrated packages, that incorporate inbuilt chiller and compressor sections with a condenser coil on the exhaust side of the unit to deal with heat rejected by the cooling process.
A special air bleed system maximises the volume of air passing through the units to compensate for the increased loading produced by the cooling function.
Strength and durability
Moducel LKS units feature special continuous seam-welded, fully galvanised Pentapost sections for additional strength and durability. Panels are of a “sandwich” construction with a flat inner panel of 1mm galvanised steel and an outer “tray” assembly, also of 1mm galvanised steel, retaining a 40mm layer of high quality infill material with excellent thermal and acoustic insulation properties.
Units feature a clean, uncluttered external appearance with no sign of external fixings (other than for access doors). Clean, smooth internal surfaces also minimise frictional losses in the airstream and make a major contribution towards the good hygiene, which is so important in clinical applications. The inner flanges on the Pentaposts help to create a positive air seal behind the panels, reducing air leakage to an absolute minimum.
The layout of the operating theatres and associated preparation and “scrub-up” facilities at Sheppard House incorporates designated clean and dirty areas. EDC have designed the ventilation system in such a way as to generate an airflow pattern between these areas which maintains sterile conditions at all times.