SOME of the country’s most prized cinema heritage is protected by products supplied by Kingspan Insulation.
The £12m BFI Master Store Building in Warwickshire was designed to maintain film in optimal conditions and is the largest building of its kind in the world. Inside, 450,000 canisters of film including classic Carry On and Ealing films and works by Alfred Hitchcock are stored on 27km of shelves. The structure’s design and performance saw it win the RIBA West Midlands Building of the Year 2012 Award.
Maintaining a constant internal temperature of -5°C with 35% relative humidity is essential to prevent deterioration of the films and is especially important for the oldest film masters, stored on highly inflammable cellulose nitrate. Kingspan Kooltherm K3 Floorboard played a vital role in maintaining those conditions with its enhanced thermal performance allowing it to achieve thermal conductivities as low as 0.020 W/m.K.
At the Master Store, two 100mm layers of Kooltherm K3 Floorboard were used beneath a concrete slab for the floor build-up. The two layers helped to minimise thermal bridging and achieve final floor U-values of just 0.1 W/m2.K.
Project director Carol Costello from architect Edward Cullinan explained: “Given the precise internal conditions required for the structure, it was essential that we could guarantee all materials specified would give us the performance we expected. The track record of achieving low thermal conductivities on a range of projects meant we could be assured that Kingspan Kooltherm would meet our requirements. Kingspan Insulation also provided technical support throughout the project such as calculating the U-value performance for the floors.”
The low Global Warming Potential (GWP) of the Kingspan Kooltherm range was another attraction as the building was designed with the aim of achieving a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating.
The building is extremely airtight, achieving a performance of 0.3m3/hr@50pa and to ensure a constant air supply and to maintain internal conditions, a sophisticated MVHR system controls air supply into the building, removing moisture from incoming air and using outgoing stale air to help cool the incoming supply to the correct temperature.
Fire safety was also critical, with the highly flammable cellulose nitrate film stock stored in 30 smaller compartments around the edge of the building. In the event of a fire each compartment can be completely isolated from the remainder of the store and the pressure relieved via external pressure panels. The insulated core of the Kingspan Kooltherm K3 Floorboard has a Class 0 fire rating helping to further safeguard the collection.
Image – The building contains 27km of shelving and 450,000 canisters of film.
