TROX UK is a leading designer and manufacturer of HVAC and building services components and integrated systems for air conditioning, ventilation and fire safety. The business was tasked with manufacturing a chilled beam air-handling system for use in the ‘smart building’ refit of London’s iconic, 17-storey Space House office development.
With a conventional ducted HVAC system impractical, as it would significantly reduce the ceiling height of each floor in the 255,000 sq. ft. 1960s circular Space House building, TROX UK was asked to create a chilled beam solution that would be concealed between each of the ceiling coffers that radiated outwards from the centre of the structure. With 17 floors to consider, as well as a link bridge to an adjoining office block, however, that equated to some 2,500 chilled beams, each containing four water coils served with hot and cold water by standard 15 mm copper pipe.
“We were looking at a task that would involve some 15,000 metres of copper pipe, with approximately 50,000 soldered joints,” says Martyn Mills, Chief Design Engineer at TROX UK. “Even if they could be recruited, the number of plumbers required to cut the copper pipe to size and solder the joints – never mind the associated cost – would be considerable. Additionally, such a large number of soldered joints would clearly increase the likelihood of leaks – and that was a risk we weren’t prepared to take. Hence, we took the decision to see if an affordably priced, high-quality CNC tube bending machine could be found.”
An online search led TROX UK to Unison Ltd and its EvBend 1000 manually operated, CNC-controlled tube bending machine. A meeting with Unison and a machine demonstration convinced the TROX UK team that the EvBend 1000, a machine widely used for bending precision components across the aerospace and motorsport sectors, would more than meet its needs.
Due to the urgent nature of TROX UK’s requirement, Unison supplied a display machine. Reconfigured to take copper pipe of up to 3 metres in length, it was installed at TROX UK’s Norfolk manufacturing facility in July 2022.
“We were confidently producing accurate and repeatable offset bends within a few days of installation – bends that would otherwise have involved an awful lot of pipe-cutting and soldering,” adds Martyn Mills. The EvBend 1000 is simple to programme and easy to use.
Between August and March, we bent 20,000 lengths of copper pipe, enabling the manufacture of all the chilled beams required for Space House to be completed well within time. Using the EvBend 1000 also halved our production costs, meaning the machine paid for itself over the course of the project.
With this highly capable and versatile manual CNC pipe bender on site, we are now better equipped for the most challenging of HVAC projects and have incorporated the EvBend’s capabilities into our design for manufacture production strategies.”
The fact that the project went so well, without a single complaint from the contractor about our product during installation and commissioning, confirms we made the right decision to purchase the EvBend 1000 and eliminate so many potential problems.
