Innovation, Efficiency, and Sustainability: Moving Towards a New Era in National Sports

The Beijing Winter Olympic Games (Beijing Winter Olympics) have pushed the technological boundaries with various groundbreaking technologies. The most representative and iconic venue is undoubtedly the National Speed Skating Oval, colloquially known as the “Ice Ribbon”, which is the newly built speed skating venue in the Beijing Winter Olympics. From design, construction and operations management, innovative and green concepts are integrated throughout, making the Skating Oval a smart venue. Ir Prof. Thomas HO, Chairman of the Construction Industry Council (CIC) led a delegation to visit the “Ice Ribbon”, to know more about the adoption of national research, with a view to promoting sustainability in sports.

Setting the Structural Work and Achieving World Records

The National Speed Skating Oval is approximately 198 meters long and 124 meters wide and is the largest single-story and two-way orthogonal saddle-shaped cable network structure in the world. This innovative architectural concept uses slender steel cables and connecting nodes to form a unique saddle-shaped rooftop. Compared with traditional support structures, the new roof requires only 25% of the amount of steel, making it lighter and more durable. By reducing the overall height by 8 to 10 meters, this technology can speed up the structure construction time and lower its cost. In view of the building structure and its efficiency and safety, the project team established 1,093 real-time monitoring points, not only to monitor the condition of the cable network structure but also to improve construction safety and risk management.

The design of the Ice Ribbon’s curved glass curtain wall is also an indispensable highlight of the venue. It consists of 3,360 glass components of different sizes and curvatures, seamlessly embedded into the frame made of 160 S-shaped steel ribs. The glass components selected by the team are all domestically produced, with high light-transmittance and low emissivity, embodying the goals of green and low-carbon construction and creating a glass curtain wall combining advanced technology, functionality, and aesthetics.

From structural design to the construction process, this project has overcame different challenges. By utilising Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology in the full construction life cycle, optimising the installation of prefabricated components, and thoroughly digitalising the management process, the team has surmounted these obstacles to enhance quality and efficiency.

Breakthroughs in Creating the “Fastest Ice Surface”

As one of the main venues for the Beijing Winter Olympics, the facility was designed to ensure the ice surface is in best conditions. The ice surface of 12,000 square meters is divided into four sections, each of which has independent ice temperature controls, allowing for synchronised operation with different uses. National Speed Skating Oval adopts Carbon Dioxide Transcritical Direct Evaporation Refrigeration Ice-Making System, which helps to reduce carbon emissions and brings a carbon reduction equivalent to planting over 1.2 million trees. In addition, the system can enhance its effectiveness by maintaining the ice temperature variances within 0.5℃, which provides strong support for top-level ice performance with a flatter and smoother ice surface. Hence, skaters have better chance to break the Olympic records or even the world records. The process of creating the ice surface is interconnected, the construction project team and research team across universities in the Mainland have pushed the boundaries of traditional technology, laying a solid foundation for the “Fastest Ice Surface”. Energy recovery, saving energy and participating in a variety of sustainability initiatives are all achieved at the same time by collecting waste heat generated during the cooling process and using it for hot water delivery, heating, ice melting, and other applications in the Skating Oval.

Operating the Smart Venue and Accelerating Innovation

Apart from embracing innovative constructions and technologies, the team is committed to incorporating technology into operations by constructing a digital twin platform to establish a contemporary and smart venue. This platform consolidates 36 independent systems, gathers an array of data sets on a real-time basis, and transmits information to enable the integration and analysis of environmental data, including electromechanical equipment performance and energy control. Consequently, the management team is endowed with enhanced capacity to mitigate risks effectively, render precise as well as dependable assessments to enter an integrated and new management mode.

Ir Prof. HO applauded the “Ice Ribbon” as a world-class construction project that encompasses excellent design, construction, operations management. It is great to see the adoption of innovative technologies such as BIM and Internet of Things (IoT) throughout all phases, with the team working to complete this leading project.