KGS Group of Winnipeg has won two awards from the Association of Consulting Engineering Companies Manitoba (ACEC-MB) – the 2023 Award of Excellence for building engineering and the Keystone Award.
The annual Keystone Award is presented to the ACEC-MB member that achieves the highest score of all projects and is deemed the best overall project.
KGS won both prizes for its work on the new Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada in Winnipeg.
“We performed mechanical and electrical engineering and municipal engineering services – parking and site grading,” said Lucien Lalonde, commercial mechanical and electrical department head at KGS.
“We’re very pleased and grateful to have won, shocked even. To win we had to beat out some great projects that were in the running for the award too.”
Opened to the public in 2022, the museum is located on what used to be a parking lot near Winnipeg International Airport, a 20-minute drive from downtown. It is one of only six museums in the country that have a royal charter.
The building is big.
With an area of 86,000 square feet, it contains 14 galleries, meeting rooms, classrooms, a gift shop and an observation lounge that overlooks the airport’s runways.
Supported on a concrete foundation with an aerodynamic façade, it was designed to be part aircraft hangar and part museum.
The facility houses one of the largest aviation heritage collections in
Canada. It contains more than 20 aircraft, six of which are suspended from the air.
It is also a busy place.
“The main floor can handle more than 300 people at one time,” said Lalonde. “It hosts many galas and weddings.”
KGS’s mechanical and electrical designs on the project contain many innovative features.
To keep costs in line, KGS worked with Manitoba Hydro to enable the facility to be serviced from a pad-mounted transformer located next to the building.
That eliminated the need for a CSTE (Customer Service Termination Enclosure), which is typically required in this situation.
KGS installed high efficiency, gas-fired condensing boilers for the in-floor radiant heating system and fan coil units throughout the building.
It also introduced high-efficiency packaged rooftop air-handling units for the exhibit hangar and themed multi-purpose room, along with a two-pipe fan coil unit system for the classrooms and related spaces.
Energy recovery ventilators provide ventilation air to the rooftop air handling and fan coil units.
KGS found it particularly challenging to procure the right temperature and humidity control system that was required for The Ghost of Charron Lake display case. The display contains a plane that sank to the bottom of a lake in northern Manitoba many decades ago. It remained in the icy water until it was eventually recovered and refurbished.
The display case was too small for typical HVAC equipment, but too large to use equipment designed for standard museum display cases.
So KGS designed a small, ducted fan coil mini-split heat pump system with an indoor condensing unit and installed a micro-climate control unit that had been designed for museums.
To illuminate the facility so that it always looks its best, KGS installed
LED lighting both outside and inside the building, including gallery displays.
The majority of the lighting was serviced by 277 volt wiring, which made it possible to install a greater variety of light fixtures as well as save money from reduced wiring costs.
KGS also installed a central inverter for emergency lighting to further reduce maintenance costs.
More savings were made by using the fire alarm speakers for the public announcement system, which reduced the cost of maintenance.
The Award of Excellence in the building engineering category and the Keystone Award were two of five ACEC-MB awards that KGS won in 2023.
It also won the Award of Excellence (Municipal and Water Technology Category) for the Lafleche Dam Low Level Outlet Conduit Remediation Project, in which KGS repaired a deteriorated pipe that presented a risk to a dam in Saskatchewan.
KGS won an Award of Excellence (Environmental Category) for the
Pauingassi First Nation Landfill Expansion Project.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2021 forest fire season affected the construction schedule, the job created a new integrated resource management centre at a remote community north of Winnipeg.
Finally, KGS won an Award of Excellence (Transportation Category) for its
Fort Severn Winter Road Relocation Study.
KGS developed new winter road routes for the northern Ontario community by using “climate-sensitive routing and construction strategies optimized through geotechnical investigations and a helicopter reconnaissance program.”
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