Funding of almost £13 million recently announced by the Higher Education Authority for research work at UCC has paved the way for two futuristic projects in Cork.
These projects will lead to a building capable of informing its occupants how they are behaving within its confines, and a blueprint on how a city can make better use of its water resources. Work on the projects will begin next October.
The "green building" concept is not entirely new to Ireland, but the one being proposed by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCC will develop the concept even further. It could become the benchmark for how we approach new buildings in the future.
Equally futuristic is the "blue city" project being researched by the same UCC department under Prof Philip O'Kane. Its aim is to use the best information technology to study Cork city's water resources: the various treatments the water receives before it is passed for human consumption, its use for industrial and agricultural purposes and the various means by which human interaction with the resource affects and, in many cases, diminishes it.
The "blue city" project, in effect, will produce a living, real-time model against which water use and abuse can be measured. It will, says Prof O'Kane, help to shape and produce future solutions for water management, not only in clean supplies, but also with respect to the behaviour of water in different conditions or as a result of human intervention.
The new building and the water project are already concentrating the minds of Prof O'Kane and his team at UCC. In layman's terms, the "green building" will house UCC's new Environmental Research Institute and for the purposes of the "blue city" project Cork itself will become a laboratory.
These are firsts in Ireland and will bring together the most sophisticated information technology tools. For instance, a highly specialised camera developed by the German space agency will be used to map the watercourses in Cork, giving more detailed definition than has been available up to now. A similar camera was part of the last, ill-fated NASA mission to Mars. It will be flown over Cork as the three-year research phase of the water project continues.
But perhaps the most immediately headline-grabbing aspect of this new frontier research is the building that will "talk" to its occupants as they go about their daily working lives. The "green building" will be as close to an exemplar of an environmentally sustainable development as a building can be.
"Green building", according to Prof O'Kane, means that the development "will meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". It will comply with the accepted world strategy for conservation.
The likelihood is that the building, which will take three years to complete once work starts next October, will be sited at Ringaskiddy, on Cork Harbour. It will be designed and built so that its environmental performance can be monitored, controlled and viewed using state-of-the-art technology.
The performance of the renewable energy systems will tell office-users in any part of the building whether they are wasting energy in their sector or whether water is being dribbled away unnecessarily.
The flow of materials to and from the building will be monitored and, in keeping with the goal of end-of-life recycling, the behaviour of the building structure itself and all equipment within it will be subject to daily data updates.
Sensor technology, building management systems and database and virtual reality software systems will enable employees to see how they and their building are performing in relation to one another. This will enable them to fine-tune the building so as to extract maximum efficiency in any area that impinges on the environment, such as waste management and recycling. "Our aim is to take the green agenda and fuse it with state-of-the-art information technology systems. In terms of the degree of sophistication, this will be a first for Ireland," Prof O'Kane said. "But if the green agenda is going to work, then I believe people must see what effect they are actually having in a building.
"The `green building' will allow us to achieve that because we will have monitors displayed at key points which will be available to tell them exactly what the position is. If you leave the heating on in your office for the weekend with the window open, for instance, the system will pinpoint where the loss of energy occurred."
In environmental engineering, he added, "we are taking the view that technology can be used to solve environmental problems". The UCC design team, led by Dr Marcus Keane and Dr Denis Kelleher, will work closely with the architects once they have been chosen. At the construction phase, the UCC research team and the architects will see the building through from the initial site-clearance stage to completion.
The objective is to approach construction with the same green principles. And when the building is functional, the public will have the opportunity to see if the dream has become a reality. Browsers on the Internet will be able to go to the UCC site and check how the "green building" is performing, whether it is maximising renewable energy and minimising waste generation. The smart building has arrived.
The "blue city" project will be no less futuristic. It will deliver a virtual world of the surface waters of the Lee river, together with the hydraulic infrastructure on which Cork depends. A high-frequency sampling system will allow the virtual world to be tuned, as an example, to the growing problem of eutrophication, or nutrient enrichment, which causes the river to turn peagreen each year.
It will be able to monitor flooding and sea-level rises due to climate change, as well as assembling immediately accessible data on the performance of the Inniscarra reservoir, its hydroelectric and water treatment plants, stormwater overflows and distribution networks.
The German space agency camera, which has already been used by UCC on another project, will give a view of the lie of the land, the Lee, its tributaries and estuary, and the coast. The model thus created will arm the planners with something they have not had at their disposal up until now, the ability to inform the decision-making process in advance of occurrences that are related to the environment as it applies to Cork's water supply and use.
The model will be able to predict the pattern of flooding on a particular farmer's land, which will have a social application, says Prof O'Kane, because the planners will be able to go to the farmer and discuss with him ways of obviating the problem, using the real-time model as a back-up. The "blue" in the project stands for clean water, after the EU's blue flag beach scheme, and like the "green building" project, this one will also be available for work-in-progress inspection on the Internet.
The UCC research institute at Ringaskiddy will work in partnership with the Atlantic Alliance colleges at Galway and Limerick, as well as with UCD and the Cork Institute of Technology and other institutes.