Moveable floor at PEARL aids urban design
Engineers have developed a moveable floor that simulates real-world outdoor environments to help in the creation of future urban areas at PEARL.
Babcock partnered with University College London (UCL) on PEARL (People Environment Activity Research Laboratory), which is a 44,000m3 net-zero facility in Dagenham, East London where public settings, such as railway stations and high streets, are simulated to analyse human behaviour as they use and move around infrastructure.
Professor Nick Tyler, Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL, said: “[PEARL] was conceived so we could see the environment as it is in real life, but to do this we had to realise the world isn't flat, so we needed a moveable floor where we can easily adjust the gradient and surface while also having holes in it."
In PEARL’s centre is the configurable, 600m2 floor which was designed, manufactured and installed by Babcock.
The floor is made up of 441 individually actuated modules that can be raised, lowered and tilted in three dimensions, creating a real-world environment where not everything is perfectly flat.
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