Water and Energy Savings Features for Utilities Serving Laboratory Equipment
Phillip Bartholomew, LEED® AP, HDR CUH2A
The laboratory equipment and the supporting utilities that are to be installed at the United States Army Medical Research Institute for infectious diseases (USAMRIID) facility were designed to minimize the use of water and energy required to support operation of this equipment.
The USAMRIID facility is a biocontainment facility housing BSL-2, 3 and 4 level spaces. These spaces require sterilizers, walk-in coolers and freezers, low temperature refrigerators, breathing air and instrument air compressors, and laboratory equipment that require extensive amounts of heat of rejection.
This heat of rejection is provided with process water, which uses a cooling tower and heat exchanger arrangement, to reject a majority of this heat with little energy and make-up water expenditure. Loads that require a lower temperature heat sink reject to the chilled water piping system. Since the use of chilled water is a more energy intensive way to provide the required cooling, its use was limited to only where it was required.
Much of the present equipment design is based on using city water, in a once through, waste to drain, fashion. If this equipment design was maintained, the resulting design would be either extremely wasteful use of city water, wasteful use of expensive chilled water, or rejecting the heat to the space and thereby increasing the cooling load of the laboratory.
The approach taken required working with equipment suppliers to ensure their equipment was compatible with a sustainable and low energy approach being taken. In some cases, this required the manufacturers to alter their standard design to meet the temperature and pressure drop requirements of these systems. In the case of the sterilizers, the internal loads were segregated between the higher temperature requirements, which could be satisfied with the warmer process cooling, and vacuum pump, which requires the lower temperature provided with chilled water.
This discussion will describe the philosophy of heat rejection from laboratory equipment, the generation of utilities dealing with this heat, ways of insuring reliability, and redundancy of these systems and the requirements of laboratory equipment to insure proper operation.
Biography:
Phillip Bartholomew is a LEED Accredited Professional, professionally registered engineer with more than 35 years general mechanical design experience, with 20 years dedicated to the design of science and technology facilities.
He has given numerous presentations and has been published in commercial
trade magazines as well as ASHRAE Journal.