“The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.” --
Douglas Adams (British comic Writer, 1952-2001)
Energy efficiency in the laboratory has emerged as a significant consideration
in lab design. A Design Guide for Energy-Efficient Research Laboratories (http://ateam.lbl.gov/Design-Guide/)
provides valuable insight into this area of lab design.
Following, excerpts from this online
guide …
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A
Design Guide for Energy-Efficient Research
Laboratories--provides a detailed
and holistic framework to assist designers and energy managers in identifying
and applying advanced energy-efficiency features in laboratory-type
environments. The Guide fills an important void in the general literature and
compliments existing in-depth technical manuals. Considerable information is
available pertaining to overall laboratory design issues, but no single
document focuses comprehensively on energy issues in these highly specialized
environments. Furthermore, practitioners may utilize many antiquated rules of
thumb, which often inadvertently cause energy inefficiency. The Guide helps its
user to: introduce energy decision-making into the earliest phases of the design
process, access the literature of pertinent issues, and become aware of debates
and issues on related topics. The Guide does focus on individual technologies,
as well as control systems, and important operational factors such as building
commissioning. However most importantly, the Guide is intended to foster a
systems perspective (e.g. "right sizing") and to present current
leading-edge, energy-efficient design practices and principles.
Foreword
A Design Guide
for Energy-Efficient Research Laboratories -- is intended to assist facility
owners, architects, engineers, designers, facility managers, and utility
energy-management specialists in identifying and applying advanced
energy-efficiency features in laboratory-type environments. This Guide focuses
comprehensively on laboratory energy design issues with a "systems"
design approach. Although a laboratory-type facility includes many sub-system
designs, e.g., the heating system, a comprehensive design approach should view
the entire building as the essential "system." This means the larger,
macro energy-efficiency considerations during architectural programming come
before the smaller, micro component selection such as an energy-efficient fan.
We encourage readers to consider the following points when utilizing the Guide.
1. Since the Guide
's focus is energy efficiency, it is best used in conjunction with other design
resources, manuals, handbooks, and guides. This Guide is not meant to supplant
these resources but rather to augment them by facilitating the integration of
energy-efficiency considerations into the overall design process.
2. Though the Guide
may seem to push the envelope of traditional engineering design practice, its
recommendations are widely used in actual installations in the United States
and abroad. We believe that successful design teams build from the members'
combined experience and feedback from previous work. Each team should
incorporate energy efficiency improvements, as appropriate, by considering
their interactions and life-cycle costs. We also recognize that there is no
single design solution for all situations; thus, the Guide focuses on
conceptual approaches rather than prescriptive measures.
Special Environments
Research laboratories are sophisticated and complex environments that are
designed to meet the special demands of experimental study, testing, and
analysis and to provide safe environments for workers. This double mission
means that laboratories must provide levels of safety, space conditioning, and
indoor air quality not usually maintained in conventional office buildings. To
this end, designs of research laboratories typically have minimal regard for
energy use.
A research laboratory environmental conditioning system must also provide
protection and comfort for occupants of the laboratory building, including
those in associated non-research spaces. The integration of dissimilar types of
spaces increases the potential for energy waste.
Example of an integrated energy concept
The example below illustrates some of the energy-efficient design process and
its incorporation into an overall facility design. The example describes the
energy-efficient design of a research institute specializing in the development
of special-purpose microelectronic components.
A central plant with constant airflow rate was chosen for the air conditioning
of the multi-story building. At the entrance of each story, the HEPA filters
are grouped centrally in easily accessible compact filter boxes according to
zones, so that monitoring and maintenance work can be carried out, without need
to enter the research rooms. An air distribution system, which is designed so
that later modifications can be made without difficulty, conveys the supply air
to custom-designed clean air distribution elements. The size and arrangement of
the distribution elements, the direction of airflow and the airflow velocity
are exactly tailored to the individual requirements of each workstation. In
some cases the apparatus is protected by the use of horizontal unidirectional
flow, in others by vertical unidirectional flow.
The workstations are thus isolated from the surroundings by the use of the
principle of spot protection. The remaining room areas of the laboratory are
air conditioned merely by spill-over flow from the clean zones, and additional
supply air devices have not been necessary. This allows both the desired room
air conditions to be maintained and an air cleanliness corresponding to
cleanliness Class 10,000 according to US Federal Standard 209D, to be ensured—at
no additional cost as far as air engineering is concerned.
The velocity of the air emerging from the clean air distributing elements was
set individually within the range 0.25 to 0.4 m/s (~50 to 80 feet per minute)
and is subsequently kept constant by means of automatic air volume control
devices.
Minimization both of the spatial extent of the area protected by unidirectional
flow and of the flow velocity are (sic) therefore used to keep down the airflow
rate to the very minimum possible. [Schicht, 1991]
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