This year, the annual Pascal Gala was held in Sheraton hotel on February 27th. Pascal is a civil engineering award given by Stowarzyszenie Polska Wentylacja to the authors of the most interesting and innovative air conditioning, ventilation and cooling systems designs. The gala organisers explain: "The award is meant to promote engineering thinking, indicate good practices and honour people and companies [...] for their distinctive engineering concepts and professional reliability. The idea behind PASCAL Award is also to highlight the role of the ventilation & air conditioning branch engineers and their contribution to construction masterpieces [..] as well as showing how important the air quality of internal environments is and how it affects our everyday life."

Among the winning projects, there was one realised by WSP in Poland: ventilation and air conditioning systems design prepared for an office building Przystanek mBank located in Łódź, Poland. The competition jury assessed it and highlighted the fact that the design is "optimised and energy-saving, combining complying with technological requirements and high comfort of the users." The solutions that drew the jury's attention inlude:

• energy modeling performed on the conceptual stage that permitted the engineers to optimise the façade and the glazing,
• optimisation of the choice of ventilation control devices done after the analysis of diverse heat exchangers,
• the efficiency of the choice of chillers (finally, there were two chillers used instead of three planned in the conceptual design),
• high level of energy efficiency achieved thanks to the use of energy modeling on the design stage.

The design was made by a WSP in Poland team: Urszula Ryskalczyk (the design author), Bartosz Marcol (energy modeling), Krzysztof Nytka, Tomasz Tomczyk, Tomasz Czerniakiewicz, Tomasz Brążkiewicz and others. 

To see more pictures from the gala, visit the award website.