On Wednesday, May 5, the expansion of the Empa and Eawag research campus in Dübendorf began with the ground-breaking ceremony for a new laboratory building. This was carried out by representatives of the client, the general contractor, the architects and the city of Dübendorf.
Yesterday afternoon, a small group met behind the NEST experimental building of Empa and Eawag in Dübendorf on a field of around 20,000 square meters that belongs to the Swiss Confederation and until recently served as farmland for a local farmer. The occasion for the meeting was a highly symbolic act, namely the ground-breaking ceremony for Empa's new laboratory building as the starting signal for the expansion of the research campus. Representatives of the client Empa, the general contractor Implenia, the architectural firm SAM Architekten and the town of Dübendorf were present when the spade went into the ground. Actually, there were several of them - in the hands of four gentlemen who are not normally seen wearing construction helmets, spades and rubber boots: Empa Director Gian-Luca Bona, Implenia CEO André Wyss, architect Andrea Gubler and Dübendorf Mayor André Ingold. Other representatives of the institutions involved then helped to open the construction site.
Campus square as a meeting place
This was the start of work that will be completed by mid-2024. A laboratory building, a multifunctional building and a parking garage will be built. The laboratory building will then offer around 60 new laboratories and offices in a compact building with high structural dynamic requirements as well as multifunctional areas on the first floor. The building volume is just under 40,000 cubic meters. The multifunctional building will one day offer 1,000 square meters of office space, with a catering area on the first floor with a loggia facing the campus square. The parking garage with over 260 parking spaces also houses Empa's vehicle fleet, including a workshop and car wash. The volume of the multifunctional building and multi-storey parking lot amounts to a further 60,000 cubic meters. All new buildings will be Minergie-P-Eco certified.
This will create a modern, attractive research campus: the entire site will be increasingly greened and all parking spaces will be relocated to the parking garage. This will make the spaces between the various areas more inviting and safer, especially for pedestrians and cyclists. A campus square will be created around NEST, offering employees an attractive place to meet and spend time outdoors.
Developments and innovations from the Empa laboratories will also be used in the new campus, particularly in the energy and building sectors. In future, research will therefore not only be carried out in, but also on and with the new buildings. For example, a field of 144 geothermal probes reaching down to a depth of 100 meters will store the waste heat from the buildings. In winter, this heat will be extracted from the ground and raised by a heat pump to be used for heating.
But that's not all: Empa's "Urban Energy Systems" department has revised the originally proposed operating concept so that a new, experimental high-temperature borehole field will be built instead of the "conventional" low-temperature borehole field. The waste heat from the chillers is fed into the ground via the geothermal probes in summer. The seasonal geothermal energy store is thus "charged". In winter, the energy is extracted from the ground again for heating; the seasonal geothermal energy storage system is "discharged". This seasonal cycle is then repeated again and again. This innovation is being studied in detail as part of a research project to find out how it affects the campus's energy supply, operation and security of supply. In addition, urine is collected in the new laboratory building thanks to special separating toilets and transported to Eawag's Water Hub in NEST. In the laboratory there, it is processed into plant fertilizer.
