In the case of the prison transformation project we worked on, this meant that there were two key components to the solution: the people that work in the prison and the building that allows them to do what they need to do in order to help prisoners in their rehabilitation journey.

Structural Options –.Various structural options can be considered to minimise material usage and reduce building height, carbon, and cost, whilst not compromising cooling performance.. CFD can provide evidence during the design process to minimise design risk and help optimise data hall designs further.

This allows the design to be improved across all disciplines.Below is an example of a structural study, looking at how structural options affect the air pressures within the data hall.. Pressure Plots from a recent Structural Optimisation CFD Analysis Study.External CFD Model.

External CFD analysis plays a crucial role in data centre design by assessing the risk of hot air being entrained by cooling equipment.We can identify potential design risks and understand prevalence and impact.

At Bryden Wood, our team utilises CFD analysis from pre-planning to detailed design stages, leveraging its insights to navigate the dynamic nature of site massing and reconcile technical requirements with local regulations.

This helps optimise the process and allows architects to test options that may reduce the building footprint and massing..CCU is the better of the two methods to take meaningful steps towards carbon neutrality, as it puts the carbon to use straight away with less risk of it escaping.

The issue with these methods is that there is still work to be done on the technology and estimations for using the captured carbon in directly transforming it into hydrocarbons.. A good measure to show how close a technology is to being used is the technology readiness level (TRL).This is a scale of 1-9, where 1 is the concept and 9 is a system ready to be implemented.

At the time of writing, the TRL for carbon capture is still relatively low, at 7 in the validation stage.It will require international and governmental investment into research to make the process more efficient and faster, and to diversify which materials specifically could be produced from the captured carbon.