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Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

Theatre renovations on Benjamin Franklin Campus

In terms of drinking water hygiene, hospitals have the most stringent requirements of any building. The Benjamin Franklin Campus in Berlin’s Steglitz district has been part of Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin since 2003. First opened in 1968, the hospital is now undergoing extensive renovations to accommodate new structural and technical requirements as well as changes in medical procedures. An increased level of patient safety is a key priority for this project.

Project data

Construction time: 2013 to 2017

Developer: Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin

SCHELL products: Water Management System SWS, VITUS VW-E-T exposed wash basin tap, Comfort PT 1000 angle valve, WALIS E electronic wash basin tap

A total of 10 new operating theatres had been completed by May 2018. Located on the hospital’s top floor, the theatres are therefore in the especially critical dead-end sections of the existing drinking water installation. In terms of sanitary facility planning, periodic very high demand for water with temporary consumption peaks also needs to be accommodated, within a correspondingly large-diameter pipe network with many rising mains and high shaft density.

Optimum support for maintaining drinking water hygiene

To ensure an optimal hygienic environment for operating theatres, only a solution able to reliably prevent water stagnating even outside peak-load conditions could be considered, which also had to safeguard the specified normal operation of the entire installation. In addition, Charité was looking to establish permanent logging and analysis for washroom usage, stagnation flushes and water temperatures. Stagnation flushes in particular should be fully automated, being executed at fixed times and also whenever critical temperatures occurred.

A case for electronic fittings, temperature sensors and SWS

Pathogens in drinking water can cause severe illness in sensitive individuals. Accordingly, maintaining water quality is an ever-present topic – especially for operating theatres. The client therefore chose to install SCHELL’s contactless VITUS E-T and WALIS sanitary fittings, together with PT 1000 temperature sensors and its Water Management System SWS. SWS facilitates regular stagnation flushes as well as continuous temperature monitoring, so as to detect potentially critical water temperatures (≥25 °C to ≤55 °C) and be able to flush this water out of the installation immediately via the electronic fittings. SWS also enables straightforward control, maintenance and diagnostics for all networked fittings.

Wired and wireless work together

For structural reasons, a mixed-mode SWS installation with wired and wireless data transfer was chosen. The cold water WALIS tap, located at the dead end of the system, is integrated with SWS to reliably prevent upstream movement from any biofilms, which could potentially contaminate the entire drinking water system.

Combined real-time and temperature-controlled automation

The Benjamin Franklin Campus utilises fixed, real-time automation control plus simultaneous, temperature-controlled hygiene automation. The flushing plan developed by Charité’s Technical Facility Management team ensures that both forms of automation complement each other perfectly to form the basis for maintaining specified normal operation. Thanks to simultaneous flushing with multiple tapping points, a sufficiently high volume flow rate is created even in larger-diameter piping to remove deposits from pipe walls. This required property of the system is achieved by grouping fittings into ‘flush groups’ in SWS.