If you use the subway, you’ve thought about it: for God’s sake, let’s get the car to leave this platform. The corridors of the Barcelona metro must be the points where the most sweat per square meter is produced in Barcelona, with subway tunnels where temperatures soar.
Now, Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) wants to combat the heat on its platforms and make waiting for the metro a little more pleasant, and to do so, it has started with one of the hottest stations in the city.
Thus, it has installed 12 ceiling fans, 6 per platform, at the Hospital Clínic station on L5 as part of a pilot test to lower the temperature on the platforms and improve the thermal comfort of the passengers. The system has been designed with environmental and energy efficiency criteria in mind.
This type of fan has already been used for some years in Metro work areas, such as train workshops, where they have given very good results in terms of thermal comfort. This pilot test is now starting at the station in the network that is recording the highest temperatures during the hot months. The investment made in the Hospital Clínic station is 60,000 euros, 5,000 euros for each ceiling fan.
The results of these fans will be analyzed to determine at which stations in the network this system could be extrapolated. In parallel, we will continue to look for other alternatives to reduce the temperature and humidity in the stations where it is not possible to install ceiling fans.
The fans that have been installed in the Hospital Clínic station are linked to the intelligent digital management system called RESPIRA®, an artificial intelligence platform that analyzes different parameters in the stations of the Metro network and applies a certain operation of the ventilation systems according to the needs, analyzing in real time variables such as temperature, humidity or air quality of the stations and adapting the ventilation to these parameters