Manly Aquatic Centre
Named after Australian Olympic champion and Manly legend Andrew Murray (Boy) Charlton (1907-1975), the Andrew Boy Charlton Aquatic Centre is widely regarded as one of Sydney’s premier aquatic health and recreation facilities.
Located in the beachside suburb of Manly, the new indoor facility is a major addition to the existing outdoor aquatic centre and is sure to prove popular with locals and visitors alike. The Indoor Aquatic Centre encompasses a total area of some 3,300m2, including over 2,000m2 of column-free space.
Needless to say, the facility’s ocean-side location presented several additional engineering and construction challenges. Indeed, the poor ground conditions, coupled with the area’s high groundwater table meant the entire building and all of the pool structures had to be piled to rock.
The Aquatic Centre incorporates a range of features, including an indoor 25m x 20m lap pool, indoor program pool, leisure pool with automated pool cover under pool concourse, and a spa.
The building itself features extensive exposed tubular trusses of up to 60m clear span at 7.2m spacing, diminishing in span to fit within the triangulated building shape. The connections of the trusses and roof bracing system are complex yet refined, resulting in an aesthetically pleasing outcome and structural expression.
The trusses support box section rafters in a sawtooth configuration allowing abundant natural light into the pool hall at every truss.
The three-level building core extends west from the pool hall, comprising a large fitness centre on the top level overlooking the oval and the pool hall, with amenities, crèche, pool and mechanical plant rooms on the 2nd level and an additional brine plantroom on the 1st level.
The building also features an extensive subterranean air duct network on two sides of the pool hall to provide warm air to minimise condensation on the expansive glass walls.
Each pool is filtered using its dedicated filtration and water treatment plant designed to comply with the NSW Ministry of Health – Public Swimming Pool and Spa Pool Advisory Document.
Each pool and water treatment plant system utilises the latest technology available in the water treatment industry, comprising Atlas Ultra Fine Filtration (UFF), automatic flow control by way of flow sensors and variable speed drives, oxidation and control of chloramines by way of high intensity, medium pressure UV plant, disinfection using a sodium hypochlorite solution manufactured on-site utilizing brine electrolysis using a Siemens OSEC electrolysis unit, pH correction using CO2 gas with a backup system using dry acid, automatic and proportional control of disinfection residuals and pH control using a Siemens water chemistry controller, and pool control boards complete with Program Logic Control and display panels controlling and monitoring all aspects of plant operation and water treatment.
