U values? - how low can you go without the structure becoming unfeasibly unique to design and build. I'm imagining a steel framed shed with insulated panels and blockwork to about 3m high all round

Air tightness - aim for 2.0m3/m2/hr @ 50Pa and probably settle for 3.0m3/m2/hr @50Pa

Direct fired gas radiant or LTHW radiant for the sports hall -LTHW rads for the rest - or if feasible use UFH (keeps the floors dry).

Direct Gas fired DHW with large capacity storage calorifiers (Lochinvar as an example) or plate HEX and lower capacity calorifiers so you can divert virtually all the boiler power to DHWS for short periods to create a semi instantaneous flow system. How much you store (and lose) is a function of how often you plan using the place)

Ventilation - I'd go for a demand based (CO2 monitoring) supply and extract with a heat recovery using LTHW for pre heat and constant minimum off coil temperature(say 18C) for the hall and a smaller heat recovery AHU for the rest of the place (heated via the LTHW and using a similar strategy)

A few big ventilators in the roof to allow much increased airflow in summer (no AHU heating enabled) for upper temperature control - you really don't want to be deploying cooling

That said, you may need some cooling if the activities are particularly onerous and the occupancy is very high - dance studio as an example

Regards

Barney

Pretty much no Nick - a commercial cross flow heat exchanger won't achieve the efficiency of a small domestic MVHR from one or two specialist suppliers - but will exceed the efficiency of many of the cheap MVHR units around - but keep in mind we are taking several cubic metres per second flow rate rather than a few tens of litres flow rate

You could employ a DX heat recovery within the AHU (evaporator and condenser in the relevant air streams), but the capital cost might very well not give a huge improvement over a cross flow HEX if you are operating a variable flow rate responding to CO2 monitoring (as a proxy for air quality)

I've just reviewed a proposal for a circa 4m3/second AHU with pretty good casing thermal performance (heat loss and bridging) and a good quality heat exchanger that achieving about 73% heat recovery at design condition - to give an order of magnitude of what's available at reasonable cost

Regards

Barney

Given that the dominant loss is the ventilation loss, then I would say that heat recovery is pretty much essential

No connection to Hoval, but I used similar units on a sports hall about 2 years ago

http://www.hoval.co.uk/blog/com/sport-halls-ventilation-how-much-fresh-air-has-to-be-provided-tips-for-planners

Regards

Barney

There's an article in the latest Passivhaus+ magazine about a sports hall, might be of use.

The Mayville Community Centre by Bere (admittedly a retrofit) might be a worthwhile reference: http://www.bere.co.uk/projects/mayville-community-centre-passivhaus-retrofit-85-savings

I seem to recall that they used bulk air-heating as this was compatible with the passivhaus fabric targets and allowed for the intermittent use patterns - i.e. a quick blast in the morning when people arrive and then allow the building to cool down at other times.

The biggest challenge in most Sports Halls that I've worked on was actually acoustics - can't have many soft absorbent surfaces at the level of noise generation. Admittedly these were schools where lessons will take place in the hall, but worth considering nonetheless. The solution could end up helping other problems if you, say, lined the hall in a perforated timber that also concealed conventional radiators for instance.

Diffuse and constant light is another thing that can be overlooked. The Sport England guidance on this is actually quite good. Again from memory, games like Badminton are particularly sensitive to decent lighting to the point where artificial light may be the only way to achieve the uniformity required to let you actually perceive the shuttlecock. May not be relevant depending on the context, but give it some thought as you'll no doubt want to keep windows to a minimum anyway for heat loss reasons.

Rick_M, I am not sure it *is* missing a 'too'. I think D_T means that 'you can't have' (that is, it is not, because of the nature of the building - the need for windows, perhaps, or the need for hard surfaces to bounce things off walls - *possible* to have) 'many soft surfaces.... But in terms of noise control, I agree with your point that (if it is possible to incorporate them), you can't have too many sound-absorbent surfaces. (On the other hand an acoustics engineer may come along shortly to tell us that you *can*!)