Brighton i360Newsletter - Issue 5 - December 1st 2014Welcome to the 5th project newsletter for the Brighton i360.

A momentous year!

It’s hard to believe it is the end of the year already. Since financial close this June, the site has been a hive of activity.

Our first spade struck the ground in July and over the following months we dismantled the on-site West Pier wreckage, built a new ‘beach boardwalk’ style access road and embarked on the huge challenge of rerouting the Victorian sewer and the nine electrical cables running beneath the site. This involved excavating rogue cables

and an old sea wall that nobody knew existed!

We have been busy off-site too. In France, the bull wheels were manufactured for the pod, allowing it to travel smoothly up the tower, whilst in Holland we finished rolling our tower cans. We have now started work on the metal rims - the flanges shown in the picture below - that attach to the cans so they can be bolted together.

The work above ground

Of course the i360 is not just about the construction of the building. David Marks, our Chairman, and Eleanor Harris,

our Chief Executive, have been busy building relationships with the community, local businesses, civic societies, residents groups and stakeholders. We have also expanded our team to include Ruth Chapman and Anna Prior, both based at the i360 site.

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The future face of British engineering‘Tomorrow’s Engineers Week’ takes place each November. The focus is on changing young people’s perceptions about construction and engineering.

If ever there was a project that could inspire future generations, it is the Brighton i360. Chief Engineer John Roberts said: “One of the wonderful things about the Brighton i360 is how visible it will be. Standing tall in the heart of Brighton and Hove, our incredibly slender tower is going to have the propor-tions of a knitting needle. Rising to the top, the huge glass pod will seem to almost defy the laws of gravity. It will constantly challenge people to ask questions: How does it balance? How can people move around inside without it toppling? How does it stand in the wind?”

It’s important that people do ask questions. John is a FREng (a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering), who recently commissioned a report to find out more about how engineering fits into the curriculum. Engineering skills are in great demand from employers, with over 2.5 million estimated job openings in engineering companies by 2022. Despite this, many children are still unaware of exactly what being an ‘engineer’ means.

A UNESCO viewDid you know that Brighton and Lewes have been awarded ‘UNESCO Biosphere Reserve’ status, joining the ranks of the Amazon rainforest and High Atlas mountains?

The i360 will offer outstanding views of the 390 square kilometres that make up the Biosphere. This includes the South Downs, the River Adur and River Ouse as well as the coast and cities.

Biosphere status has been awarded because the region offers such diversity. We have rare seahorses in the water; internationally designated grassland habitat that supports the greatest botanical diversity in the UK; natural chalk that filters our drinking water; rare species of flowers that grow on the shingle beaches and towns and cities that house a third of a million people.

The biosphere team aim to improve and raise awareness of the area, developing schemes that help us benefit from environmental resources, educating communities to increase environmental understanding and focussing on sustainability issues. This will include the promotion of local sustainable goods and services, outdoor health and eco-tourism.

Their objectives match many of our own aims:

Nature conservation: We are using elements of the old West Pier as well as locally-sourced and sustain-able materials.

Sustainable socio-economic development: 50% of the energy required to raise our pod is generated by the pod as it descends. We are also incorporating lots of energy-saving measures into our base building.

Knowledge, learning and awareness: We hope that a visit to the i360 will inspire visitors to get out and explore the natural environment. We are also exploring ways that our entire visitor experience can provide interpretation on the biosphere through our guidebook, exhibition and the commentary provided by our in-pod guide.

Find out more about the biosphere at http://biosphe-rehere.org.uk/

Focussing on the future...

Although children naturally gravitate towards building blocks, ‘test the weight’ of different surfaces (usually with their own bodies!) and use their imagination to create and draw new buildings or vehicles, the report, undertaken by Winchester University, shows that we do not encourage that mind-set to continue.

John said: “Engineering is not just for mathematical wizards and it certainly isn’t just for boys. It is about ideas - you see something that could work better, or perhaps have an idea about something new that might solve a problem. You may, like we did with the i360, have an idea about something that would offer an incredible experience. You then take that germ of an idea and work out how you go about creating it, dealing with the challenges and adapting your idea along the way. How can we build a tower on a shingle beach? How can we manage the windy South Coast weather? How do we keep it safe and reliable? It’s a puzzle, but that’s what an engineer loves!”

One way in which we hope to engage schools is to actively encourage them to get involved with the project. For Brighton and Hove students particularly, this is a building that will become part of their lives.

John continued: “We hope to launch school visits in 2015 so that children can learn more about the i360 while it is in the construction phase. It is an inspir-ing project and I have no doubt that it will trigger all sorts of design ideas from the children as they im-agine what it will become. Of course they will all get a chance to see how it does end up; once built, we will offer a free ride to all state school children in Brighton and Hove area.”

If your school is interested in visiting the i360 during the construction phase, please email enquiries@brightoni360.co.uk or call Ruth on 07804 633080.

Innovative engineeringLast month we focussed on part of Dr John Robert’s e n g i n e e r i n g lecture, looking at the proportions of the tower and how it will balance. This month we are going to look at how the i360 is designed to cope with Brighton’s windy weather.

Standard wind load

In Britain, the standard wind load you prepare for is the ‘worst 3 second gust in the middle of the worst storm which occurs on average every 50 years’. That means the i360 is designed to cope with a 50% chance of 3 seconds of extreme weather within a 50 year period. It also means that it could move more than a metre without any problems.

Vortex shedding

The real problem for engineers is the dynamic events of the wind. Because the i360 is a circular structure, the wind splits around it and creates a series of vortexes on the other side. As each one breaks away from the building it causes the tower to vibrate. The i360 engineers had to precisely calculate and offset the ‘vortex shedding’ so that those in the pod do not even feel they are moving.

Managing the wind

In typical Brighton conditions the cantilever design will manage the winds seamlessly. Should it get any windier, a series of measures are in place to counteract the weather patterns. Perforated cladding around the tower, as well as the slots that the pod travels up, disrupt the flow of the wind. Random outstands on the top of the tower break it up even further. The idea is to manage the creation of vortexes and minimise the vibration. Of course we cannot stop it completely, so there are also liquid sloshing dampers that offset the movement of the tower. If you imagine trying to slosh water up to the other end of a bath, you get a better picture of what happens. The movement of the water as it returns will be how the sloshing dampers offset the movement of the tower.

Would you like to know more? If you would like us to come and talk to your community or business group, please get in touch with our Public Liaison Officer, Ruth Chapman, at enquiriesbrightoni360.co.uk.

Out and about in BrightonNovember was a very busy month for us. David Marks, our Chairman, and Eleanor Harris, our Chief Executive, attended the Greater Brighton City Region event. The focus was on regeneration of Brighton and it was hosted in the new Circus Street space; another key area in the changing face of Brighton.

Ruth Chapman, Sir Bob Kerslake, Katherine Pearce, Nick Hibberd and Ian Parkes.

Following the theme of regeneration, Ruth Chapman, our Public Liaison Officer, hosted a visit from Sir Bob Kerslake, Director General for the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) at the i360 site. He was joined by members of Brighton Council and C2C Local Enterprise Partnership, all of whom were keen to learn more about how our progress.

As the month moved on, Eleanor went to World Travel Market to forge new partnerships before heading back to Brighton to speak at the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce lunch at Drake’s. The lunch attracted a full house and lots of good questions about the event space, which many people did not realise was part of the build.

The busy turnout continued at the Juice Breakfast, later that same week, where 140 business leaders came to learn more about

the community benefits the i360 will bring.

David Marks was also busy later in the month, speaking at the Sussex Enterprise Construction Forum, clarifying details about the funding of the project.

We continue to work closely with the West Pier Trust and in November we were invited to present at their AGM. After an update on the works, trust members welcomed the chance to quiz Eleanor and Ruth about the project. There was a general buzz of excitement about the future. As one gentleman said, “at one point there was no hope for the West Pier, but now it feels like something positive is happening.”

Brighton and Hove Hotel Awards As part of our investment into

the city of Brighton and Hove, we were thrilled to be part of the inaugural Brighton and Hove Hotel Awards. Eleanor presented the Best Initiative Award to Jurys Inn. Eleanor said, “What particularly impressed me is that they have embedded sustainability in their staff culture.”

In the pressThis month we had both Latest TV and BBC Sussex Radio visit. We are reaching a pivotal point of the project, with the end of the cable jointing and the imminent link-up of the old and new sewer. This was the last chance to get close to the underground works before they are buried back beneath our site.

The first port of call was the electrical cable trench. Eleanor explained to Paul Sawtell, the BBC Sussex radio reporter, that we replaced the old cables with brand new ones, the largest of which is 33,000 volts. If you imagine that 1 house uses 1000 volts, you get a much better understanding of why the cables had to be handled so carefully.

The next focal point was the sewer. The new concrete pipe is now largely underground, but at each junction point there will be a manhole that provides access for any future repair work.

Latest TV spoke to Dan Argles, our Site Manager, about manhole 1 - where the new concrete tunnel almost meets the old red brick sewer. Dan explained that the Victorian sewer looks bigger because it was reinforced to take the weight of a boating lake. In actual fact our new sewer is the bigger of the pipes.