CIRCULAR INPUTS FOR A FINITE RESOURCE: WATER

Water consumption and management is one of the most concerning matters to deal with in the current climatic change scenario. Water stands out for its value as a resource and for being scarce, in addition to the misuse that the traditional productive and domestic fields give to it.

In this way, for Pixel Cloud, the implementation of circular concepts in the use of water was crucial in order to reduce the public grid dependence in both intake and waste water generation.

For this to be consistently implemented, three main aspects where originally taken into consideration: Weather and rainwater availability throughout the year, the programmatic needs and the surfaces available for water capture.

RAINWATER ESTIMATIONS

The total year-round precipitations gives us an amount of 621mm of water per square meter. Separating by the two main parts of the year, Summer and Winter, we observe the following total rain per square meter:

/Winter: 340 mm

/Summer: 281 mm

Additionally, the water storage is limited. When considering what is known as the “peak rain flow“, a maximum storage capacity is defined for the worst possible rain scenario, obtaining a reasonable water capture system.

WATER CONSUMPTION ESTIMATION

Regarding the total water consumption, we consider the 600 people that will live in this building plus the commercial and green areas. For the irrigation, is important to point out that the needs are related to the season of the year.

For the estimated consumption, a generation analysis was considered, in which part of the use comes from the same waste water generated by the users and rainwater.

Once consumption and generation are balanced, reduction strategies are introduced in order to optimize the total water usage from the grid.

With these total data, a general flow of organization was needed in order to establish the different priorities of water usage.

In the previous chart we observe the total water footprint. Depending on the uses (residential, comercial, green areas and cooling) the different sources vary (rain water, recycled grey water and grid water), taking different percentages of participation depending on the part of the year, Summer or Winter.

WATER GENERAL CYCLE

SYSTEM APPLICATION IN THE BUILDING

In the overall application of the system analyzed in the Design Synthesis workshop, modifications where added such as the use of atmospheric water capture.

CIRCULAR INPUTS FOR A FINITE RESOURCE: WATER is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Masters of Advanced Ecological Buildings and Biocities 2019/20 by Students: Juan Gabriel Secondo and Irene Rodríguez, and Faculty: Jochen Scheerer.