21st Century Labs

Paulo Fundament

For more than 20 years, Paulo Fundament, PE, LEED, has worked on designing complex energy storage, energy efficiency and building automation projects. In 1987, he founded Fundament & Associates, an Irvine, Calif.-based engineering consulting firm focused on mechanical, electrical and energy-efficiency issues.

Fundament has a particular interest in the subject of energy efficiency for laboratories and has completed projects for a number of educational institutions, including the University of California and California State University systems. He speaks with School Construction News about the challenges of designing labs for the 21st century.

Q: Has the U.S. Green Building Council established any guidelines for lab energy use?

A: I don’t know if the U.S. Green Building Council has, but there’s another group by the EPA called Labs21, and they are offering the notion of efficiency and design issues for research and science laboratories. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory also has design guidelines for laboratories. There are several different agencies and bodies that provide information, but it would be nice to have LEED for labs.

Q: Do you think it’s possible for labs to become truly energy efficient?

A: They will always consume energy. Our goal is not to make them not use energy. But I think our goal is to make them use energy in the most responsible manner and to reduce the excess that laboratories can consume. Usually, people are very concerned with the internal process – ventilation rates, etc. – and energy conservation takes a bit of a backseat. It requires an engineer to be fastidious about energy conservation, and to also explain to lab occupants that their energy-efficient lab functions as well as a standard lab, if not even better.

Q: Are researchers resistant to energy-efficient labs?

A: I wouldn’t say resistant, but when they think they need to have 12 to 15 air changes in a laboratory because of an older rule of thumb, it’s hard for them to say, “Well, OK, let me adopt a newer, more frugal approach to ventilating my lab.” Usually, they’re so concerned with their science and their research that it’s a little bit less obvious to them that there’s a big impact in energy.

Q: Can you tell me about your involvement with California State University’s mechanical systems review board?

A: The board has seven members, of which I’m one, and our task is to provide peer review, to provide guidance for proper facilities design for the entire Cal State system. Many of those buildings, of course, will be science and research buildings. Below the board, there are three subcommittees. There’s a subcommittee for commissioning, a subcommittee for campus infrastructure and another subcommittee for controls, or building automation, if you will. I’m the chairman of the controls subcommittee. Each committee is developing its own guidelines, so there will be a design guideline on controls, there will be a design guideline on commissioning and there will be a design guideline on infrastructure.

The committee has been in existence for nearly a year. It’s fairly new, but I think there’s a great enthusiasm on the part of all those involved, and I think the board is going to be very effective. The board was created because of the old chronic issue that some people aren’t really fully satisfied with mechanical design for complex facilities. They may function well but they may be a little less energy-efficient, or they’re energy-efficient but they don’t really attend to the needs of the users very well.

Because they’re so complex and because there is such a need out there, the office of the chancellor decided to form a board of expert engineers that would really look at every large capital funding project, starting in the year 2004. We all get assigned different projects and we all look at them in addition to developing design guidelines. We provide our opinions on system design or system arrangement, on issues of reliability or ventilation, or whatever it may be that would impact the design. The board has the discretion to make comments and request responses from the various design teams, but the board is only advisory. If someone doesn’t want to follow one of our recommendations, he doesn’t have to, but at least there will be a record of our comments.

Q: What has been your most challenging project?

A: There have been two, actually, that were really challenging. There was the University of California, San Diego, Powell-Focht Bioengineering Building and the UCSD Leichtag School of Medicine Research Facility [SCN Nov/Dec 2004, Facility of the Month]. Both of them have a tremendous amount of mechanical and electrical systems, such as high-temperature hot water, purified water, laboratory gases, laboratory vacuums and a myriad of utilities that have to be distributed to the building. Nowadays, the building efficiency requires that you spend the least amount of space possible on mechanical systems. So, in the case of bioengineering, we were literally faced with a building where it was very hard to install all of the utilities.

The Leichtag research facility had a couple of different features that made it extra interesting. First of all, it had a five-story atrium, which is beautiful, but the atrium design was complex and the ventilation for smoke exhaust was a challenge because the amount of air that would have to come out was very large if there was smoke or fire within the atrium. The other feature that was especially interesting was the very large vivarium. They had a 20,000-square-foot subterranean vivarium, in the basement of the building, and all of the systems serving the vivarium were complex. The environment has to be fairly precise. The air changes per hour, and you have rooms that are designated pressurized or non-pressurized. You have these pressure-layering zones. You have a holding room that’s positive pressure, then the hallway serving it has slightly less positive pressure, and the airlock has to pressurize in a way that maintains all these pressures. The cage wash area has to always be negative pressure. There’s a lot of equipment and a lot of different spaces that require very precise air pressurizations. Infection control is probably the No. 1 issue.

Q: Have you seen any trends on the future of energy sustainability?

A: I think the trends are to go with variable-air volume wherever possible, which means that you design these labs with the ability to throttle the air up and down. You see a trend for more integration of lab controls with building controls, and you see a trend for a better understanding of lab exhaust systems. One of our strategies is that we don’t gather all of the exhaust from a large facility through a single plenum and then exhaust it out into the atmosphere. What we like to do is use segmented plenums – several small plenums – so that each can have its own associated suction pressure, and that provides for substantial energy conservation. If you have one large plenum, you would be exhausting all of the air at the highest possible pressure. It’s easy to make one big one, but the big ones really are energy hogs. There are many benefits to smaller plenums: they conserve energy over the long run; they provide for better maintenance; and if there’s an issue with the plenum, the whole building doesn’t go down – it’s confined to the area where there was a problem.

Labs consume five to six times more energy than a typical office building because they run 24/7 and they are most of the time 100 percent outside air, so the air that comes in goes through the air handler, gets filtered, is either cooled or heated and distributed to the building, and is then exhausted outside the building. You can’t rebreathe lab air because it might have been contaminated. And because labs don’t shut down, any little incremental energy conservation that you obtain really gets multiplied and carried through every hour of the day for every day of the year.

Q: What elements will an energy-efficient lab of the future have?

A: I believe it will have a control system that responds to activity within the lab and it will assume an operating condition based on the people in the lab. It will know when the lab is not occupied and assume an operating condition that way. It may even, in the future, catalog what contaminants are in the laboratory through a barcode inventory so that if the lab does not contain hazards of a certain level, then it can assume yet another, lower level of operation that would consume less energy. Conversely, if the system has information about the contents and they are hazardous, then that space would then increase its ventilation. Knowing where the hazards really are in the lab of the future will increase energy conservation. This is a system that’s being talked about even in consumer groups pertaining to the inventory of your refrigerator at home, so if you’re out of milk, it will tell you to buy milk next time you’re at the store.

Q: Any additional thoughts?

A: What I’m working on right now for the California State University’s control subcommittee is how to use campus data that comes through an energy management system and how to build a reliable, working parameter out of this data. The issues that I’m grappling with are reliability and also data freshness, only using data that is current. If your campus buildings are able to reliably tell the central plant what they need, then that central plant can really operate much more efficiently on a real-time basis. A few people have been discussing the policies that would have to apply to that data before it can really be relied upon by plant engineers, and because of this, plant engineers end up setting manual controls at the plants. Hopefully, this work I’m doing will help illustrate how we can use field data more reliably, it would help central plants throttle down significantly.

Labs21 – www.labs21century.gov

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – www.llnl.gov