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Cooling the Underground
Underground. Overheating.
The London Underground system has 268 stations and around 400 km of track. Every day around 4.25 million people use it.
It’s dirty, crowded, claustrophobic and hot. Of course coming from Australia hot isn’t something we’d necessarily see as a disadvantage in an English winter, but when the Underground gets hot, it’s really hot. It reached 47 °C in the 2006 European summer. Clearly the Tube needs to be air-conditioned.
That’s easier said than done.
The age, depth and size of some of the tunnels have made air-conditioning a problem for years. A competition with a hefty financial reward proved fruitless, and one recent “solution” was a poster campaign urging passengers to carry bottles of water to help keep cool. But the government is taking the problem seriously, and has introduced a new, well-funded project called Cooling the Tube.
Cooling, as you know, works by moving heat from one place to another. The problem is, essentially, that there’s nowhere in the narrow, well insulated tunnels for the heat to go. However, new measures are being introduced, and they look very promising. One is a new system of industrial-sized fans in ticket halls and concourses at busy stations, which will create currents of cool air. Another idea is an innovative water-cooling system, which makes use of water in the ground surrounding the underground part of a station. It’s being trailed at Victoria Station, where groundwater that seeps from the River Tiburon is collected and circulated through heat exchangers. Once the water is warm, it’s returned to the sewers. The environmental impact is tiny, but the result is a significantly cooler station.
And happier commuters.
There are plenty more innovations in the pipeline. You can read a detailed account of the Cooling the Tube project by visiting the following link.
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