星空传媒

St Mary鈥檚 Church in Osterley lies right under one of the main flight paths for nearby London Heathrow, the world鈥檚 busiest airport with over 1000 flights a day. Noise is clearly an issue, so when architect Terry Haigh built a new church hall, he ended up installing 178 BP Solar photovoltaic glass panels on the south-facing slope of the roof. Completed last June, the solar roof will not only generate electricity, it will also act as an acoustic reflector.

Much of the sound generated by planes passing overhead bounces off the glass roof. Supported by glulam beams, the solar roof also acts as a rainscreen in a composite sandwich roof construction, whose multiple layers help boost acoustic performance. On the smaller north-facing slope of the hall, where photovoltaic panels would have less sunlight to convert to electricity, an aluminium sandwich panel roof incorporates a loft void for acoustic protection.

鈥淚t works,鈥� says Haigh. 鈥淵ou get aircraft noise within the hall, but it doesn鈥檛 affect normal speech.鈥� Maybe it should also be used on the 1856 church itself, where the roar of the jets overhead punctuates services, according to BP Solar鈥檚 Ray Noble.

The electricity generated powers the hall鈥檚 heating, lighting and hot water. Haigh expects the church to sell more excess supply to the National Grid over the year than it has to buy during winter, helped by plenty of thermal insulation. There鈥檚 fibre-glass filling in the timber-frame walls (U-value: 0.31), 100mm of Jablite on the floor (0.2), while the roof has a U-value of 0.18 on the south side and 0.21 on the north.

Solar panels have been installed alongside major roads in the Netherlands and Germany in the past few years to contain traffic noise. The DTI has funded 80% of the 拢140,000 installation cost for St Mary鈥檚 church hall as part of its large-scale field trial of photovoltaics.