Portman Square, London

35 Portman Square is a 7,500 sq.m contemporary office building located in a prime location and providing the flexibility and energy-efficiency expected by international companies.

The brief to the design team was to provide an energy-efficient air conditioning & lighting solution within the original 1960s building shell while maximizing ceiling heights and introducing false floors. Suspended ceilings would have obscured the panoramic views across the garden square so shallow chilled beams were selected to house all services above the window line.

The beams were too shallow to house conventional control modules yet to achieve the required degree of flexibility using modules within the corridor bulkhead would have required nine independent cables for connections to the three fluorescent downlights, four LED uplights and two sensors per beam.

Delmatic suggested a Dali solution so that just a single mains supply and a two core Dali bus would connect to each beam. All the lighting management hardware within the beam connects directly to the Dali bus: the presence detectors and multisensors which pass information on occupancy and daylight levels to the Dali network, the Dali four-relay module which switches each LED lamp, and the Dali ballasts within the fluorescent downlights. The system is configured so that the multisensors relate lighting to occupation and the amount of daylight while the complete system is managed and monitored through graphical software at a head-end PC with remote access available through the building IT network and, for third-party maintenance and monitoring, via the internet.

Emergency lamp performance is managed and recorded via the Dali network and Delmatic Dali emergency test and monitoring units control the feed to the battery invertor pack and monitor the performance of the battery. Emergency test commands (initiated manually or automatically in accordance with BS5266 and/or EN50172) are transmitted along the Dali network and performance data is passed back along the Dali bus for collation and reporting at the head-end PC.

The fully-flexible system allows switching and dimming patterns to be configured to suit tenant partition and zoning layouts while incoming tenants are able to customize their domain by incorporating infrared dimming from hand-held or desktop controllers, telephone switching and dimming, web browser control of lighting and integrated scene-setting.

Consultant � Dunwoody & Partners

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