Today, let’s take a look at how bus exhaust fumes will be removed from inside the terminal.
Remember photos of the plenum as it was being built? The first photo below taken on October 29, 2010 is a reminder of its appearance while under construction. In that photo, the plenum is the 10-foot wide passageway between the two parallel concrete walls on the right. It acts as the collection point for overhead ducts that remove air from the bus travel lanes that circumvent the passenger waiting area in the center of the terminal. The second photo is a shot from the inside as it now exists. The dimensions are approximately 10 feet wide by 20 feet high. And it’s 200 miles long, or so it seems.
In the first photo above, look carefully at the plenum wall. You can see a series of rectangular holes along the top of it. In the first photo below, which I took from inside the plenum, notice the grates along the top. They fill the holes you saw in the other photo. Those holes/grates are the entry points into the plenum for the duct work. The second photo below shows the duct work between the beams in the ceiling of the bus travel lanes in the main part of the terminal.
So far, we’ve seen how the exhaust fumes are collected and delivered to the plenum. As I mentioned in Friday’s blog, the air will pass from the plenum through filters in one of the mechanical rooms before it is released to the outside. Here is a rendering showing the above-ground “chimneys.” As you can see in the center of the rendering, there are three of them (nice design, by the way). One is the outlet for the filtered air. One is the intake for fresh air. The other one would be used if there were a fire in the terminal. Fans would kick into high gear to remove smoke and release it through the third chimney, which would suddenly become a true smoke stack. The chimneys are being cast off-site and will be mounted on the three circles shown in the lower right corner of the following photo that I took on April 18, 2011.
I uploaded 40 photos since last Monday to our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor.com, and I still have a few more to go. After you check them out in the “Weekly Photos” tab, be sure to go to the “Plan View” tab to see time-phased views from various angles starting with the beginning of the project more than a year ago.
AWESOME!!