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The Water Cube - Chris Harding PDF Print E-mail
In July 2003 the competition to design the National Aquatics centre for the 2008 Beijing Olympics was won by the consortium of Arup, architecture firm PTW, the CSCEC (China State Construction and Engineering Corporation) and the CSCEC Shenzhen Design Institute (CSCEC+DESIGN). Its radical new design which drew its inspiration from the natural formation of soap bubbles impressed the panel of judges made up of acrchitects and engineers from around the globe as well as pre-eminent Chinese academics.

The Design

The structure of the watercube was based formation of ssoap bubles as the most efficient sub-division of three dimensional space. ARUP based their design on Irish Professors Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan´s  proposed solution to the problem of “What shape would soap bubbles in a continuous array of soap bubbles be?” (Physasists at Trinity College). The Weaire–Phelan structureis is based on a class of chemical compounds known as clathrates. This structure divides space into areas of equal volume  with the minimum surface area, thus making an efficient use of space and is mainly made up of pentagons as well as a smaller number of hexagons of equal volume.

The Water Cube is  made from steel members bolted together where three meet to form a node. There are 22,000 steel members and 12,000 nodes. The building was clad in ETFT foil whose insulating properties creat a greenhouse affect, trapping heat and warming the interior.

Energy efficient elements

1    Use of natural lighting saves 55%  on lighting energy in the leisure pool, with smaller savings expected in other areas. This comes from the use of ETFE as the walls for the Water Cube which allow more light to pass through.
2    Heating costs are lowered by using the solar enegy falling on the building and trapping it. The enegy consumption of the building has been reduced by an estimated 30% because of this. There is a 3.6m cavity between the of air between the inner and outer layers of the walls and a 7.2m cavity in the roof. These cavitys enhance the greenhouse effect.
3    Energy recovery systems use the heat from exhaust air to warm the cold fresh air in the ventilation system.
4    In Northern China water is a valuble comodity and the predicted demands of the water cube were above that which the current water systems could provid.  Factors such as the low availabilty, high utilisation, evapo-transpiration as well as unreliable climatic factors meant that  efficient recylcing and reusing of water was a critical factor in the design process. The water cube reuses and recycles 80% of water harvested from the roof catchment ares, pool backwash systems and overland flows, by incorportating water sensitive urban design principles into the Water Cube.

Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a crucial component to the design

ETFE cushions were used to make the external and internal walls of the Water Cube.  ETFE is used instead of glass in many large structres such as the Eden Project in Cornwall or the Alliany Arena football grounds in Munich Germany. ETFE is a type of plastic which was designed to be resistant to corrosian and maintain its high stregth over a wide range of temperatures. As well as having a high melting temperature it does not emit toxic fumes when ignited. ETFE. In the design proces ETFE´s main competitor is glass. And whilst ETFE has 1% of the weight of glass, transmits more light, costs between 24% and 70% less to install, is self cleaning and reyclible it is prone to punctures by sharp edges. This problem can be overcome however by using heat welding, tears can be repaired with pathces and multiple sheets can be ´sewn´together´.

Sources

http://www.arup.com/australasia/feature.cfm?pageid=3460

http://www.tcd.ie/Physics/Foams/structure.php

http://www.idaireland.com/news-media/publications/flashes-of-brilliance-pub/chinese-snap-up-irish-des/index.xml
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