1 Mitre Way, Old Sarum
We can solve technical challenges that others walk away from!
Brackley was brought in to develop a care home on a potential site that was already owned by an operator with whom it had extensively worked with previously.
- 120-bed Dementia & Nursing Care Home
- Built for The Orders of St John Care Trust based on standardised household model.
- The home opened in spring 2016.
- Specialist foundation solution required to mitigate ground borne vibration from nearby steel cutting factory.
- Site originally allocated for employment use.
The problem was that their site was blighted by a unique phenomenon: vibration from a nearby heavy industrial process was materialising as a reverberated sound nuisance in a number of homes in the new housing development adjacent to the site. Early dialogue with the local authority environmental health officer established that as the proposed development was for full-time dementia and nursing care, the requirement would be that the design and construction of the building should attenuate the vibration passively to such an extent that any remaining reverberated sound would be below the threshold of human audibility. Furthermore, the solution to achieve this needed to be detailed and justified as part of the planning application.
The Brackley team engaged a number of specialists and consultants, including the UK’s leading authority on reverberated sound. However, after a period of comprehensive on-site testing and analysis, it became clear that the orthodox approach in similar situations, such as hospitals built over underground railways, isolating the building on ‘isomeric’ bearings was both impractical and prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, it was not certain of meeting the required levels of attenuation.
Notwithstanding this setback, Brackley worked hard with its team, looking into alternative solutions, and together identified an innovative approach to vibration attenuation in the form of ‘mass damping’ – albeit that the science and the data for this technology was still very new. The proposal was to replace the traditional foundations and ground-floor construction of the building with a substantial concrete raft and accordingly the proposed design was tested and developed through an iterative process of computer model simulations until a demonstrably viable and robust solution was refined.
The local authority was sufficiently convinced with the proposal to grant planning consent on the condition that the building was constructed as designed and then tested on completion to verify that any remaining reverberated sound was inaudible.
Brackley was equally confident in the design solution and its ability to construct to the required specification and proceeded to invest and develop the 120-bed scheme. At completion, the required acoustic tests exactly matched the predicted results of attenuated reverberated sound and the building was passed for occupation!
