Laboratory Safety and Energy Efficiency: Delighting Owners, Researchers, Facilities Directors, and Operations Managers

Michael Labosky, MS, CIH, CIH Consulting, LLC
Ray Sinclair, Ph.D., Rowan Williams Davies & Irwin Inc.

In this presentation, an environmental health consultant and an environment health and safety consultant will address the diverse and demanding issues that must be integrated into the planning and design for high-performance, sustainable, energy-efficient, and safe laboratory design. With extensive knowledge of laboratory planning and design, the speakers will discuss methods for integrating the various, diverse, and sometimes competing aspects of laboratory design to achieve the most responsible and energy-efficient outcomes. Through a series of conceptual case studies culled out from recent experiences in laboratory design, the speakers will present practical steps to assess health and safety concerns while offering cost-conscious options to incorporate sustainability goals.

This session will address the following:

  • Reducing energy costs by optimizing ventilation rates, discussing the importance of placement and quality of air changes and not strictly the quantity, and translating that into a clear understanding of the performance of integrated laboratory systems.
  • Addressing concerns about what ventilation and other changes mean to the safe operation of laboratories, learning how to define and quantify what this means, and understanding how to address certain air quality issues locally in order to minimize over-designing the entire space for local and specific events.
  • Investigating whether room air flows can help or hinder indoor air quality and thermal comfort, and developing practical applications to interpret the dynamic of room air flows and the potential impact on the overall engineering systems.
  • Evaluating the role of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling in decision making and evidence that not all CFD is the same.
  • Examining the performance of containment devices and understanding the balance between the size of containment, the impact on the overall engineering systems, and the impact on safety within the laboratory.
  • Exploring how laboratory designs impact outdoor air quality, how chemically robust research can contribute significantly to high particle effluent from a laboratory, and how to minimize or mitigate this aspect of laboratory planning and design.
  • Using risk assessment to assist in achieving efficiencies.
  • Identifying specific areas where risk assessment information may prove to be critical.
  • Determining how well planned and designed laboratories can provide energy savings while not compromising laboratory safety.

Part one of this presentation will occur in session B3: Human factors and Architectural Expression: Daylighting and Delighting the Researchers, which begins this discussion of sustainability in laboratory planning and design, addressing the human factors in laboratory design.

Biographies:

Michael Labosky is the owner of CIH Consulting, LLC ,where he specializes in providing environmental health and safety (EH&S) consulting services to academic, biotech, and research institutions, as well as the construction industry. From 2000 to 2011, he was the associate director of Harvard University EH&S, where he managed laboratory safety, industrial hygiene, and fire safety programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Previously, Mr. Labosky was senior industrial hygienist at the University of Rochester, where he managed industrial hygiene, laboratory safety, and safety programs. For the past 20+ years, he has provided EH&S support to project teams designing and renovating teaching and research laboratories. In recent years, Mr. Labosky has been heavily involved in planning modern sustainable laboratory facilities with aggressive energy reduction goals. Mr. Labosky is a certified industrial hygienist, with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Clarkson University and a Masters of Science degree in industrial hygiene from the University of Rochester. He has participated in or maintains professional affiliations with the American Industrial Hygiene Association, National Fire Protection Association, the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists, and the Campus Safety Health and Environmental Management Association.

As a project director with more than 20 years of consulting experience, Dr. Ray Sinclair provides technical direction and leadership over a wide range of projects involving the science of high-performance buildings. His work includes integrated design issues with ventilation, energy, comfort, air pollution, and wind engineering. Dr. Sinclair has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and is a member of ASHRAE and the National Fire Protection Association. Dr. Sinclair has more than 20 technical publications and has participated in many presentations and conferences such as GreenBuild, ASHRAE, the Design Futures Council, and the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association.