SketchUp: NHS Western Isles Hospital

 

GreenspaceLive is a software and consultancy shop based on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland. The company was founded in 2008 as a spin-out from the Greenspace Research, a low-carbon building and renewable energy research program at Lews Castle College, University of the Highlands and Islands. This case study about gModeller, the company’s SketchUp energy analysis plugin based on gbXML, comes to us from Donald Macaskill, Technical Manager and Energy Engineer at GreenspaceLive.

Making hospitals more energy efficient

Hospitals have unique energy consumption demands. Not only do a hospitals require lighting and heating 24 hours a day, but they also require ventilation, sterilization, laundry, food preparation and important medical equipment to be powered as well. Therefore, any improvements made to the building could drastically reduce the bills, freeing up money to be spent elsewhere.

The NHS Western Isles Trust are very proactive in trying to reduce their energy costs and carbon footprint. To determine their baseline energy consumption and carbon emissions and then to simulate a number of fabric and technology improvements to their largest building, they turned to GreenspaceLive. A hospital model and energy analysis workflow was created in Google SketchUp Pro with GreenspaceLive’s gTools suite.

 

Completed model for gModeller 

 

Project Methodology

To start, existing 2D CAD models and scanned paper drawings were shared via gWorkspace. These floor plans were then imported into Google SketchUp Pro. Once the floor plans had been imported, each floor was extruded to the correct height and dimensions. A detailed model is not required for the gModeller plugin, so the model could be simplified to single faces for walls, floors and roofs.

Once completed, attributes were added to the model using the gModeller’s customised materials, located within the Paint Bucket tool in SketchUp. Next, spaces were identified using the manual Space tool, which allowed the model to have zone specific information, such as heating, lighting and ventilation for different areas.

 

The completed gbXmL model 

 

The gbXML building information model generated by gModeller was now ready to be exported to an energy analysis engine. In this case, gEnergy was used, however, exported models can also be imported into Green Building Studio, Ecotect, Trace, DesignBuilder and others. gEnergy was initially run using the Hospital’s existing fabric and technologies to establish a baseline Energy Performance rating, subsequent analysis runs were then carried out with simulated improvements to the building, including proposed refurbishment changes, to determine the impact they would have on performance of the building.

Once gEnergy runs were completed, the model was exported to Google Earth and presented to the clients, showing gDashboard energy results on screen while touring their model.

 

The model in Google Earth with energy data 

 

Using the gWorkspace cloud platform, the modeling team was able to share and collaborate with the client throughout the process. Team members and client representatives were able to view, download and share files from the project, as well as view all energy runs that were undertaken.

The Results

Armed with the tools and the data, NHS Western Isles Hospital were able to model different scenarios and view the impact these changes would have. The results were dramatic – making a number of changes to the heating system, the team was able to demonstrate that the most effective change would result in over 50% energy savings, while reducing the CO2 emissions by almost 80%.

Dave Tierney, part of the Energy Team at NHS Western Isles Hospital said, “Using gTools, senior executives and staff received an overview of our carbon emissions, energy consumption and the impact changes in technology and fabric will have on our building. We can clearly see the differences in low carbon technology investment options. The results will help shape our plans for tackling carbon emissions and energy consumption in the future.”

The seafloor in Google Earth

More than two-thirds of Earth is covered by oceans. If you drained all of that water away, you’d see huge basins that have never been explored, an undiscovered planet in our own backyard.

Today is the three year anniversary of an explorable ocean seafloor in Google Earth. We just released a major update to our global underwater terrain dataset, called bathymetry, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in partnership with NOAA, the US Navy, NGA, and GEBCO (with major contributions from IFREMER and IBCAO).

The update covers ocean topography from all over the globe and reveals our most accurate view of the seafloor to date. This new detail comes from spacecraft measurements of bumps and dips in the ocean surface as well as shipboard soundings from surveys carried out by over 40 countries. With this update to ocean terrain data in Google Earth, 15 percent of the seafloor is now available at 1 km resolution.

You may remember a Sun article reporting the discovery of a street grid where it’s believed the lost city of Atlantis would have been located off the West Coast of Africa. The discovery turned out to be a data artifact related to the way data was collected from a ship sailing back and forth to survey an unknown area. This recent seafloor update has been improved to blend better, and “Atlantis” has again disappeared into legend.

Previous terrain data showed what appeared to be a city grid on the ocean floor (left), which was confused for the lost city of Atlantis. Updated data more accurately reflects the seafloor terrain (right).

(Click on image to enlarge)


Another place you’ll notice an improvement in the ocean terrain data is the Mediterranean Sea, particularly south of Cyprus, where the boundary between the Eurasian and Arabian plates is now more clearly defined.

The Mediterranean Sea: before (left) and after (right)

(Click on image to enlarge)

Our last example shows improvements to the land-sea mask along the coastline of Guam. You’ll notice a dramatic improvement in the resolution of both the coastline and neighboring Mariana’s Trench, the deepest trench in the world.

Guam and Mariana’s Trench before (left) and after (right)

(Click on image to enlarge)

In order to make this update possible, our partners at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UCSD have curated 30 years of data from more than 8,000 ship cruises and 135 different institutions. If you’d like to get a closer look at these changes, watch our video tour of this new terrain.

We hope you enjoy diving deeper than ever in Google Earth!

Google Street View is mapping Bulgarian streets soon

Google is now ready to finally begin touring the streets of Bulgarian cities and towns, a report by website dnevnik.bg claimed on February 14.

Google Street View, which offers panoramic views from a particular spot alongside a street, can be used both through Google Maps and Google Earth applications.

It was unclear which cities Google’s camera cars will tour first, but the list of destinations included all the major cities – Sofia, Varna and Plovdiv – as well as about 70 towns. The list included all of Bulgaria’s major winter (Borovets, Bansko, Pamporovo) and summer resorts (Slunchev Bryag, Zlatni Pyassutsi, Balchik and Sozopol, among others), as well as historical towns like Koprivshtitsa and Melnik.

As is in other countries, Google will blur out faces and licence plates of cars caught on camera. Separately, people will have the option to ask Google to blur out photos of their property if they so desire.

The report did not specify an expected date for when street views of Bulgarian cities and towns would be available, given that it will take several months to process the photos and string them together.