After almost 30 years in consistent use, a bold transformation to dramatically improve the customer experience and environmental credentials of the landmark Terminal 1 Multi Storey Car Park has been unveiled.

Specialist contractor W H Good Project Management, working with Manchester Airport Group Plc have completed the major upgrade involving structural work, painting, cleaning, signage and state of the art LED lighting and Bay Monitoring technology.

Kingfisher Lighting were approached by the W H Good Building Services division to provide a challenging lighting solution, involving the external lighting of the top deck split level car park utilising LED products.

Phil Sumner, Director of W H Good Airports commented, “All development projects are expected to adopt a sustainable approach, and in support of Manchester Airport’s overall environmental plan, the LED illumination alone will save circa 500 tonnes of carbon emissions per year”.

The Project Engineer for Kingfisher Lighting stated, “From the first meeting all involved in the project realised the challenges ahead of us.”

The engineer adds, “The first challenge was to devise an optimum lighting scheme for quite a large area over a split level. This would have to take into account physical restrictions imposed by the layout and structural pillars. Given the location, the additional challenge was to ensure the lighting scheme would ensure complete containment of light overspill and achieve minimal glare and upward light. The second challenge was the expected time frame. From the first meeting with the client, the project would have to be installed within six weeks.”

Given the design brief and time line involved, the Kingfisher team of lighting designers presented a design proposal based on the ILO LED utilising a combination of twin and triple mounted lighting points.

ILO LED is an architecturally inspired luminaire designed for the urban environment benefiting from the latest LED technology. Available with four LED arrangements (36 LED, 54 LED, 72 LED and 90 LED), ILO offers a practical level of light output with a lamp lumen range of 3235lm to 8088lm with colour temperature at a cool 6000K. Expected life is estimated at 60,000 hours based on 80% lumen maintenance. In practical terms this is approximately 12 years.

The low profile, flat glass design ensures zero upward light and tight containment of overspill, whilst the Comfort Light Optic ensures minimal glare to onlookers.

The lighting scheme involved a combination of twin and triple mounted ILO LEDs with a mounting height of 6m. To achieve the lighting specification of 20 lux average, the lighting team designed with the ILO LED 54 ST series. This specification utilises 54 LEDs with a total rated power of 68W and a lumen output of 4853 lumens and provides a street lighting distribution. Compared with a conventional 70W light source this particular version offers energy savings of up to 16%.

The luminaires were mounted on a purpose designed twin and triple bracket system with 500mm outreach and designed to allowing direct fixing onto a standard 8m lighting column.

In addition to the energy savings to be gained by specifying LEDs, going forward the virtues of a virtually maintenance free system will certainly simplify the maintenance and reduce the costs of maintaining a system 13 storeys up in the air!