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Building Biotech
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Highly specialized
technical buildings rely on the right subcontractors.
by Peter Downs
Amechanical contractor deals with airflow, and an electrician with
electricity, but the roles they play in construction projects vary
from building to building. Getting contractors who understand the
roles they play is essential to the successful construction of any
highly specialized, technical building. In St. Louis, that’s not
a problem.
Above:
Biotech research facilities like The Danforth Plant Science Center
(pictured above) pose extraordinary building challenges that require
highly specialized, fail-safe HVAC systems.
Reliability and redundancy are key requirements in both data centers
and biotech research facilities, but for different reasons. Electronic
data is very ephemeral. Lose power for a fraction of a second and
it is gone. Compared to that, living things are very long-lived.
Lose control of the climate or power in a laboratory and it might
take years to reproduce the experiment.
For all their differences, both types of facilities need to be built
right, built to last and built with redundant systems to avert failure.
The productions that get them there, however, are very different.
The electrician has the starring role in data centers and Internet
hotels. He determines the customers’ electrical needs, and how they
are distributed.
The mechanical contractor is a supporting actor, designing the air
handling system to support electrical equipment and meshing his
work with the electrician’s. Computer equipment can give off a lot
of heat, for example, and the mechanical contractor has to design
a system that will get rid of that heat to keep temperatures at
the level at which the equipment works best.
In biotech research facilities, the roles are reversed.
“I can’t stress enough the importance of HVAC (heating, ventilation,
and air conditioning),” says Michael Robinson, director of preconstruction
services for Sachs Electric. “That affects us when we’re looking
at size requirements for transformers, feeders, switch gear, and
so on. We’re closely linked to what happens in the mechanical systems.”
“Air change is the tail that wags the dog” in biotech research buildings,
agrees John Schneider, senior engineer at C & R Mechanical.
Air delivery and exhaust is the primary difference between biotech
research buildings and office buildings or data centers, Schneider
adds. While other buildings can reuse air, biotech labs can’t. To
avoid contaminating experiments with airborne particles from other
labs, biotech labs use 100 percent outside air. At the Donald Danforth
Plant Science Center, for example, the air handling system completely
changes the air in the laboratories every four minutes.
The air system also has to maintain negative pressure in each lab,
he says, which means the air system has to exhaust more air than
it lets in. That stops airborne seeds or organisms in one lab from
wafting out the door and into another lab.
At the same time, the people working in labs still want to be comfortable,
so the heating and air conditioning have to be sophisticated enough
to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity despite the constantly
changing air. And it has to be done efficiently. Many government
grants for research facilities tie the grants to energy efficiency,
Robinson says. Typically, grants are tied to buildings obtaining
certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership
in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) standards.
If you take all the energy you put into heating or cooling a building
and throw it away every four minutes, you would have some idea of
how energy inefficient it is to completely replace inside air with
outside air every four minutes. So, the Danforth mechanical team
of Icon Mechanical and C&R Mechanical came up with a way to recapture
some of that energy to increase energy efficiency and cut costs.
They put a coil in the exhaust air stream to recapture heat in the
winter and cooling in the summer, which it transfers to a similar
coil in the intake air stream to warm incoming air or cool it in
the summer before the mechanical system expends new energy to bring
it to the desired temperature. But, here is where it really gets
complicated. Comfort and energy efficiency aren’t static targets.
They’re very fluid. If one, two, or four people in a lab are using
fume hoods, they affect everything in the room: the amount of air
changes, the load on the HVAC, the pressure gradient, and so on.
So, electricians have to help tie the fume hoods into the air systems.
At the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, measuring devices on
the hoods can sense the speed of air crossing the sash, Schneider
says, and they relay that information to the automated air system
controls, which then adjusts the air supply to maintain air changes,
pressure and temperature.
There are other, simpler ways in which electricians have to subordinate
their craft to mechanical trades in biotech buildings. When controlling
airflow is paramount, electricians have to change even simple things
they do. After drilling a hole through a wall to run wire, they
have to seal it.
“We have to do special things to make sure there is no air path
from light receptacles, for example,” says Alan Linder, vice president
for business development at Sachs Electric. That is a simple thing,
but it also is very labor intensive and expensive.
Whether considering exotic switches or mundane sealants, the successful
construction of air handling and electrical systems in a biotech
research building requires close coordination between the trades.
For that reason, Pat Murphy, Jr., vice president at the Murphy Company,
says his company has found that one of the most effective approaches
“is for the owner to bring in the general contractor, mechanical
contractor, and electrical contractor under contract early to work
closely with the owner and engineer through the design process.”
Such a coordinated construction team, he says, “reduces risk to
the owner by enhancing the probability of success through meeting
the owner’s schedule, which is accelerated by successful turnover
of validated systems. Since the owner seeks a return on his investment
as soon as possible, all valuable constructability ideas need to
be “placed on the table as soon as possible.”
Murphy Company has helped build research facilities in St. Louis,
Denver and elsewhere, under a number of different construction delivery
methods.
Robinson, of Sachs, agrees with Murphy’s assessment, adding that
it is important to bring the mechanical and electrical contractor
in early, so they can understand what the building’s researchers
really want.
“We build commercial buildings day in and out where there is nothing
special the owner or tenant is looking for. In biotech, however,
these researchers are very, very sensitive to getting what they
want and in people understanding what those needs are,” he says.
“To be able to sit down and understand their needs is key” to making
the project a success.”
Linder compared buildings to cars. Most office buildings are like
family sedans. They’re all pretty much alike, within a narrow range
of “custom” options. High-tech facilities like biotech research
labs, however, are more like racecars. The requirements of the design
are both more specific and more extreme than anything a sedan driver
would dream of.
Biotech research facilities are one of Sachs’ target markets. Sachs’
in-house engineering capability makes the company well suited for
a design-build or design-assist role, Linder says.
Peter Downs is a free-lance writer and editor of Construction
News & Review.
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