VVB awarded LUL Cooling the Tube Contract – Jan 07
VVB Engineering is one of many partners working TfL on the Cooling the Tube Programme, having secured a contract to test & develop the proposed station Air Cooling system, in partnership with Costain, Halcrow and OTB Engineering. The Air Handling Unit transfers heat between the station environment and either a borehole or chilled cooling medium.
TfL is investing £150m of its £10 billion programme to address the issues of heat on the Tube. Getting heat out of the London Underground (LU) Network is a huge engineering challenge. TfL has established a dedicated programme team to provide solutions to prevent temperatures in the deepest section of the network reaching unacceptable levels.
The need to avoid increasing temperatures on the underground system is actually the flipside of TfL’s success. Services are planned to increase by 25%, and the new trains, that can accelerate quicker, are on order. But moving more customers and more trains takes more energy, even when the best of modern technology is applied, and even more energy creates heat.
And, controlling temperatures is harder then ever before, because the ground around the tunnels has heated up over the many years since they were built.
Keeping the Tube’s customers cool involves developing new technologies, as well as making best use of more traditional approaches.
