The day of
beginning of the course “Development Project” has finally came!
I am really
excited and looking forward to this day because I have an valuable chance for
me to conduct 3-days field trip, rather than attending lecture in University,
to Macau, Kaiping and also Guangzhou so as to get an in-depth study on
urbanization and city development issues in aforesaid place. Before conducting
the field trip, I did some research on the destination of our field trip. There
is a common interesting point among the destination since it contains both new
and old development in all destinations. I think this topic – the balancing of
new and old development within in city is a really hot topic in Hong Kong since
the Government of Hong Kong have launched Urban Renewal Project in these few
years. Therefore, we can learn experience of the urban planning, land use
requirement and social, political and economics factors of adjacent cities
which can enrich our horizon and beneficial to our future career
development.
Venetian
For day 1 of the field trip, our first
destination was Macau and we visited Venetian immediately after the arrival of
Macau. The back of house area and supporting technology of the operation of the
Hotel and casino were the main focus of this trip.
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| Figure 1.1 Uniform Conveyor (1) |
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| Figure 1.2 Uniform Conveyor (2) |
For the operation of hotel and casino, the most important thing is efficiency. Therefore, the supporting technology for the operation must be sufficient enough to handle and to fulfill the client’s need. And I believe this uniform conveyor can improve the staff’s efficiency because every staff is only required to scan their staff card and they will get the clean uniform. The whole process for getting the uniform was only about a few minutes.
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| Figure 1.3 Chiller Plant Room |
Although we are working in construction industry, there are limited chances for us to visit electrical and mechanical plant rooms. Therefore, we learnt a lot from it. However, as reminded by the staff from Venetian, photo-taking is not allowed in most of the plant room.
First of all, we visited the chiller plant room that is the part of mechanical, ventilation and air-conditioning system. For the basic principle of MVAC system, it can refer to below figure for easy reference:
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| Figure 1.4 Basic MVAC system |
According to the discussion with the staff from Venetian, the MVAC system in Venetian can be basically divided into three parts; one is central air-conditioning system, second is mechanical ventilation system and the third one is the electric and control system.
For the central air-conditioning system, as shown in the above figure, the chilled water for the air-conditioning system will be formed a closed loop between cooling tower, chiller and the termination unit (air handling unit and fan coil unit). First of all, the chilled water will be undergo heat exchange in chiller; the cooled water will be pumped (that’s why there are many pumps in the chiller plant room) to the air handling unit and fan coil unit located around the building to produce a cooled area while the heated water from chiller and the termination unit (air handling unit and fan coil unit) will be transferred to cooling tower for undergoing the primary cooling process by fresh air.
For the mechanical ventilation, as per discussion with the staff from Venetian, the exhaust fan will be provided in Toilet, Kitchen and E&M plant room in order to maintain the required air change rate.
For the electric and control of MVAC system, I believed it is very important, especially for the hotel and casino, because control system can be used to control and monitor the thermal comfort of the hotel and casino. Therefore, in Venetian, there is a centralized control room to monitor the thermal comfort of whole development. Basically, there are two fundamental functions of the automatic control system in Venetian; one is switching equipment on/off and the second is adjusting the output of equipment to maintain the required operating conditions. Besides the chiller plants will be direct interfaced with the control system, cooling load demand of hotel and casino, operation of pumps, monitoring of the status of all major equipment and automatic temperature control of air handling unit and fan coil unit will also be monitored and controlled. In the other words, the staff in Venetian can work in their control room to monitor and control all the major equipment and the cooling demand so as to control the thermal comfort to fulfilled the client’s satisfaction.
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| Figure 1.5 Emergency Generator |
Furthermore, for the electrical supply to the whole development, it is basically divided into three parts:
1) Normal power supply
(Mainly feed from Companhia de Electricidade de Macau - private public utility company)
2) Emergency power supply
(Feed from emergency generator in Venetian; mainly served for the Fire Services related equipment and other essential equipment)
3) Uninterruptible power supply
(Uninterruptible power supply mainly served the IT equipment, e.g. computer, when there is an unexpected power disruption. Since the data for the hotel and casino is very important, the design of Uninterruptible power supply of Venetian is much stricter than the local requirement in order to prevent the serious business loss.)
When it comes to the discussion of electrical supply system, the lighting design is always the hot topic. According to the discussion with the staff from Venetian, the luminance level is actually under the regulation by the Authority in order to have a better surveillance condition in casino.
Old Macau Tour
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| Figure 1.6 "Old" Street of Macau |
Afterwards, we had an Old Macau Tour which contain a lot of places to visit, for example, Lisboa Hotel, Largo do Senado, Fortaleza do Monte and some old districts in Macau. After the old Macau Tour and the visiting of Venetian, I think that Macau is a wonderful place because Macau is undergoing the urbanization with a lot of casino development on one hand; and on the other hand, the conservation of historical heritage is excellence so that the historic center of Macau, which consist of two separated zones on the Macau peninsula was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. And I believed that Macau is much better than Hong Kong in the area of historical heritage conservation because of three reasons:
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| Figure 1.7 Ruinas de Sao Paulo |
1) Advanced Conservation Practice
(In order to prepare the submission of Historic Center of Macau to UNESCO for the World Heritage Award, the government of Macau has performed a lot of professional analysis in order to design the appropriate and specific conservation strategy for Macau.)
2) Legislation Protection
(Macau developed the legislation for the protection of heritage since 1970s in order to balance the urbanization and conservation of heritage. The legislation required the new development to be more heritage-sensitive.)
3) Public awareness towards heritage conservation
(The government of Macau had launched a lot of promotion events for Macau resident about the heritage conservation. Therefore, the Macau resident are encouraged to know more about the historical building and development and thus, they are willing to protect the heritage.)
References:
Date of access
08/08/2014
Date of access
08/08/2014
3) Mok, Keng Kio. "Walk to global vision:
driving heritage development by world heritage award: Macau-a colony with east
west culture." (2012): 62-67.
4) Tom de Saulles. "The illustrated guide to mechanical building services" BSRIA, CIBSE (2002)
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