Staggs and Fisher

This new 106,000 sq. ft. research center will house a 10,000 sq. ft. clean room, along with engineering research laboratories, conference rooms and a multi-purpose 100-seat capacity area with audio-visual capabilities.

This building included variable air volume systems for laboratory supply and exhaust systems as well as constant volume systems for the 10,000 sq. ft. clean room. The clean room space ranged from Class 10,000 in the dressing rooms to Class 100 in the Litho Area. The building uses a large amount of steam and chilled water, due to the outside air requirements and includes an energy recovery system.

The building electrical system is also designed with safety in mind. The service entrance has two primary circuits with manual switching and double-ended substations for reliability on both the 480 volt and 120 volt services. The building is also equipped with a diesel powered emergency generator which supplies life safety loads such as egress lighting and also fume hood fans to keep the hoods under negative pressure during power outages. In addition to the fume hood, the entire clean room is connected to emergency power, including the supply fans and building boiler and chiller. In addition to HVAC, plumbing and fire protection, building system design included fire alarm system, communication horizontal pathways, risers, telecommunication rooms layout, workstation communication outlet rough-in, clock system, lighting controls, door security system rough-in and TVSS for building power distribution. Communication cabling and devices were included.

Because of the size of this project, we input the entire chilled water piping system and modeled the existing and new flow conditions. With this model we were able to determine where high pressure areas and design economical modifications to the system to allow for the required capacity without affecting the remaining campus.