BEng (Hons) in Architectural Engineering.
Learning Outcomes assessed via this project.
6224BEUG: Architectural Engineering Project 3
LO1 Work as part of a team to critically evaluate the requirements, risks, and implications of a client’s brief for an Architectural Engineering project.
LO2 Apply Architectural Engineering technology and management procedures to produce, and evaluate, conceptual designs for Architectural Engineering projects and to progress these to detailed solutions.
LO3 Produce documentation to demonstrate how the project was organized and managed professionally and effectively within the team.
LO4 Present project solutions to an expert panel and critically evaluate the skills and competences demonstrated in the completion of the project against the relevant competence criteria of appropriate professional institutions.
Project Scenario
Private Independent Treatment Centre
A national independent health care company is planning to build a new hospital in the Cheshire area just outside the city of Chester. Although the treatment centre is hospital like in its nature it is not a general hospital, it will offer a limited range of specialist services. The main area of specialism is planned orthopaedic surgery, primarily hip and knee replacement surgery but hand, wrist, shoulder and elbow orthopaedic surgery will also be performed. A large part of the work within the treatment centre will be the surgical procedures but the centre will also undertake the associated diagnostics, pre and post-operative care, physiotherapy etc. Therefore the new treatment centre will include a number of operating theatres (and the associated anaesthetist and recovery resources) as well as x-ray, physiotherapy, day and post-operative wards as well as the patient welfare facilities.
Although the treatment centre will be owned and run by an independent company, it will deliver treatment on behalf of, and funded by, the NHS, in addition to fee-paying patients or those who have private medical insurance. As such, the building must meet or exceed the standards expected in a modern NHS hospital.
As such, the building is intended to provide a clean, modern, safe, state of the art treatment centre, which will appeal to both fee-paying patients as well as NHS patients who will choose to have their planned treatments at this centre.
The key objectives of this development are:
- To provide outstanding health care treatment programmes.
- Provision of modern, high quality, safe, health care facility in a building which is welcoming, reassuring with the flexibility to meet the needs of all stakeholders as well as providing the centre’s staff, with an excellent working environment.
- Ensure that the company continues attract patients via all funding streams as their treatment centre of choice.
- Ensure that the building is efficient, sustainable and contributes to the clients objective of an efficient, manageable and environmentally excellent facility.
Your role is to work as an integrated functional team to analyse the proposed building and manage the building services design and build proposals for the client.
Additional Information
The following data is available to you:
- The CAD floor plans of the proposed building layout together with various other drawings and documents.
- A IES-VE model of the building.
Approach & Expectations.
This project is essentially a collaborative team activity but the expectation is that your team will be structured and organized in a professional way, consistent with the level of professionalism expected of a team of incorporated engineers. Consequently, you should be aiming for a quality of completed work that is indistinguishable from that produced by professional engineers and consultancies. As such you will be assessed not only on your product (i.e. the work you produce for the various tasks) but also on your processes (i.e. documentary evidence of the way you plan, organise and manage the project). 20% of the marks available are for how you organize and manage the project. Therefore the expectation is that you will not only produce work of a professional standard but you will also project manage the team and the work in a professional way. This has a double benefit as experience shows us that the best organized teams produce the best quality work, poorly organized teams rarely, if ever, produce good work.
Working together with others as a member of a team is a fundamental part of project based work and enhances collaborative learning. Project based learning gives you the opportunity to develop your communication, problem-solving and collaborative team-working skills. The assessment will encourage you to learn together and problem solve collectively. The work is structured such that it reflects the real-world requirements of professional engineers and will throughout the assessment facilitate the development of your skills and attributes such as professional report writing, independence and responsibility, resource and time management.
All reports, drawings and other supporting documents are to be produced to a professional standard. There is an expectation that each team will establish professional working practices, and organize and structure itself as an effective professional project management team.
You are therefore expected to record and document how you have worked effectively as a team and developed the project as a whole. Whilst this is a collective document it is essential that the contribution and involvement of each individual within the team is also identified.
Note that all the Reports must contain a page, signed by each team member, stating who had worked on which parts. A section may have had contribution from more than one person; that is fine, but please state which people have been involved in which section.
Each member of the team will be required to assume responsibility for the various roles within the overall project management.
These might include, but are not limited to, the following roles:-
– Overall Project Manager
– Quality Assurance
– Progress and document tracking
– Minutes and communication.
– Modelling and analysis procedures
– Risk Manager
– Drawings Manager
– Program Manager
– Detailed Design Manager
The work should be well researched and informed by academic study but should be totally applied and contextualised to this building. Non-contextualised generic statements and strategies may serve as an introduction but the main focus should be the application to this building. The project must be evidence based, all decisions, designs, costing, programmes and calculations should be evidence based and capable of being substantiated. Costings, rates, profit margins, time allowances, programming etc must be in-line with typical standards, procedures and recommendations etc.
Assumptions
In reality the design team for this new building would be able to obtain instructions from the client or Architect to clarify any issues or approve decisions. You are therefore free to make ‘reasonable’ assumptions in order to progress the project. By ‘reasonable’ we mean assumptions that are in line with all the evidence and that you don’t use assumptions as a substitute for research and investigation. Assumptions should be a last resort and should be made when it is not possible to obtain definitive information from another source. If you need clarification on any point or further guidance on any assumptions you need to make you should contact the module leader (Steve Wynn). Any assumptions you make, together with the logic, necessity and justification for these assumptions should be clearly stated within your report.
Assessment
Although this is essentially a collaborative team based project this does not mean that the contribution, both in quality and quantity, of each individual will not be recognised in assessment and the marks awarded.
You will see from the details which follow that this project is divided into a number of tasks, some of these tasks are assessed as a team activity and others are marked on an individual basis. These are clearly identified in each task.
For those tasks which are identified as being assessed as a team activity, procedures will be used to adjust the marks of each individual to reflect their contribution. The principle is that if a team has one member (or more) who does not fully participate and contribute equitably (in both quality and quantity) to the work produced or the management of the team, then there is no reason why they should receive a mark higher than their contribution deserves due to the efforts of others. Likewise, there is no reason why the lack of effort from one individual who doesn’t participate should penalize the marks for those members of the team who do.
In general however, it is expected that the groups who collaborate and work well together will find that these adjustments will only make very small changes to the marks for each assignment.
Task 1: Project Appraisal and Develop the Design Brief
Using the drawings and other data provided together with case studies and information from your own research, complete an appraisal of the project and develop a design brief. Prepare a detailed, informative, evidence based report to include the following:
- Your interpretation of the building, its features and priorities in order to be effective and successful, the client’s and end users’ needs and requirements, priorities and objectives and how these may influence the eventual design decisions for the building services installations and the completion of the project.
- Using appropriate sources, select and justify the internal thermal, visual and aural environmental conditions required for the various locations within the building together with the appropriate external design conditions.
- Using the information provided apply best practice to update and configure the IES virtual environment modelling software so that it accurately reflects the buildings properties, usage, equipment and systems.
- Using the thermal model complete an initial analysis of the buildings compliance with Part L of the Building Regulations and identify and where appropriate address any potential issues which may prevent the proposed buildings from complying.
- Using the thermal model establish the following initial data
- the heating loads for the various habitable locations.
- Identify any locations with a potential for overheating in the absence of air conditioning or other cooling strategies.
- the cooling loads for those areas identified as having the potential for overheating.
- the predicted building performance including annual energy consumption and carbon emission rates for the building using typical but non-specific M&E installations.
- analysis of adequacy of the natural lighting provision for the relevant areas of the building and consider methods of improving the daylight penetration into the building.
- analysis of where the use of passive measures may potentially be used to maintain comfort conditions without the use of mechanical cooling, heating or ventilation systems.
Note: Appropriate procedures and current thinking should be applied to ensure the reliability of the results obtained by comparison of the predicted data with established benchmarks.
- Estimation of the likely electrical loads for the building
Note: this task provides the assessment of Learning Outcome 1 of 6224BEUG. This task is to be completed collaboratively as part of an effective contract team. All members of the team must be seen to be contributing to this task. The task will be marked as a team assessment.
Task 2: Feasibility and Concept Design Development
- Examine the feasibility and practicality of installing renewable and/or low carbon technologies as part of the development of this building. Your study should examine all relevant environmental and commercial issues as well as the practical construction and engineering implications involved in installation, commissioning, operation and eventual removal or replacement. Use thermal modelling and other analytical techniques to include comparisons of energy usage, carbon emission reduction, payback period, whole life cycles costing, maintenance requirements etc. Your study should include but is not limited to
- Biomass
- Solar Energy PV
- CHP
- Natural ventilation or other passive strategies
- Air and/or Ground Source Heat Pumps
- Rainwater harvesting
- Wind turbine
Make a clear statement of which, if any, of these technologies you will be incorporating in your design proposals for this building.
- Complete a factual evaluation of the feasible options for the provision of the M&E Services to establish the integrated design strategies you are proposing to progress to concept design. Include an evaluation of the comparative life cycle costs of alternative options including a clear statement of your selected preferred strategies with reasoned objective justifications for your selection.
- Produce outline concept design proposals for the provision of the M&E services for the building (sketches, schematics, space requirements, product selection, etc) to confirm the suitability of the selected strategies and inform the detailed design in the next task.
Task 2 is to be completed collaboratively as part of an effective contract team. All members of the team must be seen to be contributing to this task. The task will be marked as a team assessment.
The submission deadline for module
Task 3: Detailed Design
Develop the concept designs into a fully detailed design proposal.
The report to include:
- Development of the concept design for the M&E Services for selected sections of the building. The designs to include 2 and 3D drawings to fully detail proposed layouts, space allocation and clash avoidance. The selected sections for which detailed designs are required will be definitively identified once task 2 has been completed.
- An assessment of the Compliance with Part L of the Building Regulations and the energy performance of the building incorporating your detailed design. Use appropriate standards and benchmarks to evaluate the reliability of these predictions.
Task 3 requires a collaborative approach in order to maintain the integrated design and as such is a natural progressive development of tasks 1 & 2. However the work produced by each individual in the team is to be assessed separately. Each member of the team must take individual responsibility for the completion of identifiable elements of the above task.
Tasks 2 & 3 provides the assessment of Learning Outcome 2 of 6224BEUG.
Task 4: Management, Documentation.
All of the above reports, drawings and other supporting documents are to be produced to a professional standard. There is an expectation that the team will establish working practices, organise and structure itself as an effective professional project management team.
You are therefore required to record and document how you have worked effectively as a team and developed the project as a whole. Whilst this is a collective document it is essential that the contribution and involvement of each individual within the team is also identified.
Examples of documents and activities that might be included in this detailed record include, but are not limited to:
- Team structure and organizational charts, identification of individual and collective responsibility, lines of communication.
- Minutes of all meetings.
- Procedures and protocols.
- Workflow management.
- Evidence of planning and review
- Evidence of consultation meetings,
- Collective agreements and agreed procedures for decision making, resolving disputes, working times, quality control procedures, document control mechanisms etc.
- Progress and time management reviews.
- Reflection on the design process and the final design.
- Complete, reviews and appraisals of the contribution and achievement of yourself and other members of your team.
Note: this task provides the complete assessment of Learning Outcome 3 of 6224BEUG This task is to be completed collaboratively as part of an effective contract team. All members of the team must be seen to be contributing to this task. The task will be marked as a team assessment.
Task 4 provides the assessment of Learning Outcome 3 of 6224BEUG.
Task 5: Presentation:
Your team will be required to make a formal, multi-media presentation of all aspects of your project to a formal review panel. This should include a critical evaluation of the engineering and project management solutions produced by your team.
The presentation will be a team presentation but each member will be marked individually for their presentation skills.
Task 5 is worth 8% of the marks for this module.
Task 6: Personal Professional Development
As part of the appraisal of your own contribution and achievement you are required to produce an engineering practice report to assess the extent to which you satisfy each of the CIBSE competencies expected for Associate Membership / Incorporated Engineer status. Explain what evidence you have for each, and what you plans to do to improve on any aspects which you feel need further development.
This is an individual assessment..
The submission deadline for Task 6 is 23.59 on Friday 8th May 2020. Task 6 is worth 7% of the marks for this module.
Tasks 5&6 provides the complete assessment of Learning Outcome 4 of 6224BEUG.
The marks for Tasks 5 & 6 are aggregated to form Assessment 3 titled “Presentation” This is worth 15% of the total marks for this module.
Assessment Criteria
Marking/Assessment criteria are the knowledge, understanding and skills that you are expected to demonstrate in the particular assessment task(s). Tutors use these criteria when marking your assignments to determine the mark given and to provide
feedback to you on your performance. Note that 40% is the pass mark for this module. You must get a MODULE mark of at least 40% in order to pass the module. However you are not required to achieve this mark in each assessment component; it is the weighted average mark which matters.
Some work may be mainly calculations and/or drawings, in which case it is marked in terms of the proportion of the work which is correct. Other assessments require answers in the form of a report, in which case the following applies:-
80% and above (First)
Exceptional and outstanding work of professional quality. Fully responding to the question or task, error free and showing substantial evidence of critical analytical thought, originality and a full understanding of relevant theory.
70% – 79% (First)
The answer contains all the relevant information and has a coherent, logical and precise argument. It will also show an awareness of the broad and subtler implications of the issues. There will also be evidence of a wide knowledge with the depth of understanding that comes from reading around the subject. The mark reflects the level of critical analysis and original thought. Arguments will be supported by fact, clearly referenced.
60% – 69% (Upper Second)
The question is approached in a confident manner, the issues are identified, evidence and reading are used and some awareness of broader issues is displayed. There is some critical analysis but the work lacks the fluency of a ‘First Class’
answer.
50% to 59% (Lower Second)
This is the mark for a solid answer that grasps the material but lacks coherence and does not always recognise the broader implications. Whilst it shows some intelligent application and understanding it lacks a clear and concise grasp of the critical
analysis required.
40% to 49% (Third)
Shows some basic knowledge but there is difficulty in comprehending the material in general and the question in particular. Little critical analysis or awareness of the broader implications and issues behind the question.
39% or less (fail)
Little, if any, evidence of having a grasp of the basic course material. A simplistic approach to the question, disorganised with insufficient material and awareness. There may be patchy evidence of understanding but not sufficient to pass. Shows little awareness of reading or understanding the issues. May well contain errors of fact.
