The Australian War Memorial is currently undertaking an eight-year $550m major redevelopment project to modernise and expand its galleries and facilities to continue telling Australia’s story of service and sacrifice. With the scale of works across the site so large, works have been broken down into smaller packages with three main construction partners contracted for the work.

Benmax were awarded the mechanical services contract for Main Works Package 2 by Hindmarsh Constructions playing a primary role in the delivery of the CEW Bean Building Expansion and construction of the purpose-built Central Energy Plant (CEP).

Now complete, the CEP is Australia’s largest 'vertical closed loop' GHX system and provides chilled and heating water to the entire AWM site - encompassing five separate buildings and 145,000m² of floor area - via a central ring main with a total capacity of 5.55 Megawatts of cooling and 3.8 Megawatts of heating.

The CEP system uses the ground’s thermal mass and relatively consistent underground temperature throughout the year to provide heating and cooling, instead of using natural gas-fired boilers and chillers, ultimately saving on cost, space and emissions.

The CEP chillers and heat pumps use magnetic bear compressors with the low load machines being able to operate in either cooling or heating modes via manual change over valves. The inclusion of additional heat exchangers between the geothermal water and chilled water allows for effective free cooling during the colder months when the plant is operating predominantly in heating mode, while an additional three traditional cooling towers provide a backstop for peak demand periods during summer.

With the Federal Government wanting the country’s public service to be running at net-zero emissions by 2030, the War Memorial’s CEP project is an important step forward and an example of what new builds and expansion builds for museums, galleries, and large public spaces can be.

For the Bean Building expansion project, Benmax’s role was to assist in the partial demolition of services and to provide HVAC services to the expansion of the building including new office space for staff, temperature and humidity-controlled collections store and new archival stores, as well as additional viewing rooms.

With Benmax also awarded Main Works Package 1 and Main Works Package 4 (with Kane Constructions), our scope of work covered not only the Central Energy Plant and Bean Building expansion, but also concurrent works in the New Main Southern Entrance expansion and the preliminary sitewide pipework.

The in-house expertise of the Benmax team to support all stages of project works -from design and construction needs to commissioning expertise - were critical to managing the staged works and to resolving the challenges experienced on the large heritage site.

Benmax successfully handed over the CEW Bean Building Expansion and Central Energy Plant to Hindmarsh Constructions in 2024 and is delighted to see these areas now open to AWM staff and the broader public.