Provincial Health Services Authority: BC Women’s and Children’s Hospital, The Teck Acute Care Centre (TACC)

Two significant aspects of the BC Women’s and Children’s Hospital, The Teck Acute Care Centre (TACC) project were the incorporation of sustainable design strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and operating costs, and resilience design strategies to mitigate the consequences of mass casualty events.

By Affiliated Engineers May 12, 2020

BC Women’s and Children’s Hospital, The Teck Acute Care Centre (TACC) hospital replaces aging and inadequate facilities that could not accommodate the growing number of patients, the specialized care projections for the facility, or the new technologies that are vital for diagnosing and treating today’s chronic and more complex diseases. Two significant aspects of this project were the incorporation of sustainable design strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and operating costs, and resilience design strategies to mitigate the consequences of mass casualty events.

AEI’s energy modeling services helped garner a 35% energy savings over ASHRAE 90.1-2007 and more than $700,000 in financial incentives from BC Hydro.

Classified by code as a “post-disaster” facility – double headwall capacity in more inpatient rooms can accommodate patient surges – the building was designed to stringent energy standards that support both performance goals and resilience requirements. To achieve an absolute energy target, the mechanical design makes use of advanced heat-recovery devices to simultaneously optimize heating and cooling. Air-cooled chiller/heat recovery eliminates need for water in cooling. Water-saving strategies reduce total volume of on-site water storage needed to provide 72 hours of domestic water.

The finished building — totaling 640,000 sq. ft. — was designed to meet LEED Gold certification requirements.

Mechanical engineering concerns started with providing redundancy to ensure that systems remain operational in the event of equipment failure. In general, the design provides N+1 level redundancy: any individual piece of mechanical equipment can be out of service without compromising peak system capacity. TACC is targeting Canadian LEED Gold certification.


This article originally appeared on Affiliated Engineers’ websiteAffiliated Engineers is a CFE Media content partner