Centrally located in Orange County, California, the Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC) provides transportation service for three million local residents as well as 40 million annual visitors. A LEED Platinum-certified building, the structure is 67,000 square feet with three levels.
ARTIC’s unique architecture includes a large number of windows and a dome-shaped structure, which results in high solar gains. Due to ARTIC’s size, controlling the climate inside the building with a conventional forced-air system would have been nearly impossible.
Instead, HVAC designers for the project chose to implement a radiant heating and cooling system. Radiant cooling allows instantaneous removal of heat through absorption. Installing ViegaPEX™ Barrier tubing at tightly spaced increments (6 inches on-center) allows it to be within two inches of the finished surface floor, which gave the engineer the ability to immediately remove the solar sensible gain. For the ARTIC project, the cooling capacity ranges up to 40 btuh/sq. ft. This provides an energy savings of 34 percent over ASHRAE 90.1-2007.
“We installed 44,000 feet of in-slab heating and cooling pipe, 18 manifolds and 12 pumps,” said Paul Redgate, Pipe Fitting Superintendent for California Comfort Systems. “We’ve done some smaller stuff but nothing on this scale.”
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