Dedicated to advancing sustainable laboratories globally.
H1 Decarbonization | Alternative Energy in Action
​Plant Controls (That Actually Work!) in Electrified Cold-Climate Laboratories
The policy-accelerated push to electrify HVAC plants in lab buildings poses a unique challenge to engineers designing for cold climates. This presentation proposes an approach to resilient electrified heating plant design for labs in Climate Zone 4A. The plant arrangement and controls strategies of two electrified research buildings are presented. The Virginia Tech (VT) Innovation Campus Academic Building 1 (ICAB), located in Alexandria, Virginia, opened in January 2025. The Princeton Plasma Innovation Center (PPIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory will open in January 2027. With a research focus on physical sciences, ICAB and PPIC contain dry laboratories with hazardous exhaust. Electrified plant components include air-source heat pumps, air-cooled chillers, heat recovery chillers, geothermal heat exchanger, sewage waste energy recovery, and electric boilers. Both plants are multinodal, meaning that they are centered around a hydronic loop for movement of thermal energy between producers and users. In both buildings, plant control modes are written to stage plant elements with the dual goal of maximizing plant resilience while minimizing overall energy use. Plant performance data from the ICAB building automation system and from the PPIC Modelica-based dynamic simulation will be presented. Tested strategies for plant sequence tuning with respect to hydronic controls, compressor equipment efficiency, and setpoint resets, will be discussed.
An All-Electric Hot and Chilled Water Plant for Lab Buildings With Lower Operating Cost and Carbon Emissions
The University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Mission Bay District hot and chilled water plant concept design will deliver hot and chilled water to 2.7 million SF of existing and future lab buildings. This all-electric plant will use air source heat pumps and water-cooled chillers as the primary hot and chilled water generators, with hot and chilled water thermal energy storage (TES) and heat recovery chillers used to reduce operating costs below that of a conventional gas-fired heating plant and cooling plant without TES or heat recovery. This simultaneously reduces plant operational carbon emissions by 90 percent. We will provide an overview of the process used to arrive at this design. We will present key design decisions around selecting hot water design temperatures and sizing TES tanks to optimize performance while minimizing footprint and first costs. We will provide an overview of the measured simultaneous heating and cooling loads and how to size heat recovery systems to take advantage of this overlap. We will provide lessons learned that can be applied to help decarbonize other district energy plants that serve lab buildings.
H2 Sustainable Science | Cold Storage Case Files
Freezer Data: Is There Such a Thing as Too Much?
For nearly 5 years, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has been using freezer monitoring software to track temperature, door openings, and energy use for hundreds of ultra-low temperature freezers, standard freezers, and refrigerators. Utilizing this data, JHU sustainability and facilities staff were able to identify outliers, including freezers consuming too much energy, underutilized freezers, and freezers that were being operated incorrectly. This presentation will examine how staff sifted through freezer monitoring data to identify these outlying cold storage units and the subsequent steps they took to reduce their energy consumption, including direct engagement with researchers and utilization of financial incentives.
Tame Cold Storage Chaos and Unlock Sustainability With Better Storage Management
Samples are the foundation of scientific discoveries. Having cold storage for samples and reagents in, or close to, the lab is essential for researchers to do their work each day. Typical research labs use 16 to 26 percent of their lab space for cold storage (refrigerators, freezers, ultra-low freezers, and LN2 tanks). Following the assessment of 51 different research facilities and evaluation of over 3,600 cold storage units, on average only 55 percent of the overall space in these cold storage units were being utilized. When contents of these units were evaluated for potential use, freezer boxes were not typically full, and over 50 percent of the items in the cold storage units were considered unusable by the researchers. Optimized sample management empowers researchers to manage their work better, recovering critical research time, space in the lab, and the capital and operational costs associated with running unnecessary cold storage units and meeting sustainability goals. This talk will focus on the common findings across different types of institutions (industry, academic, and medical research institutions); the tools used to facilitate change; and mechanisms to minimize the effort associated with inventory, reduce the amount of cold storage needed, and sustain order. Learn about this transformational sample storage journey and how you can manage the culture shift along the way to save space, time, and money.
H3 Sustainable Design | Renovation for Transformation
Re-Imagining the Dragun Science Building
The ASG/BKM design team partnered with Anne Arundel Community College (AACC) to re-imagine their mid-century Dragun Science Center into a state-of-the-art Green Chemistry and Physical Sciences academic center. Dragun is at the heart of AACC's campus but is limited by extensive structural, site and programmatic constraints. Restrictive structure has created a dark, unwelcoming building with poorly proportioned spaces not conducive to student success. The re-imagined design preserves the mid-century aesthetic while stripping away obtrusive elements to modernize the instructional and student spaces for a safer, functional design. A centralized stair offers campus connectivity through the building, tying collaboration areas with labs and digital immersion. The team is using the I2SL Lab Benchmarking Tool to inform our approaches to sustainable operations. We are using energy modeling, innovative immersive technologies and instructional methods related to green chemistry to create a holistic modern science design. This will be the first science building on campus that successfully eliminates natural gas, with chemistry labs switching to electric Bunsen burners. Building systems will minimize energy consumption and operational costs with utility sub-metering and be benchmarked against campus consumption. Signage and digital displays will engage students and visitors in both the green chemistry program and energy usage.
Creating Priorities in a Building That Needs Everything
Every campus has aging laboratory buildings in desperate need of overhaul. These facilities often have poor energy performance, fail to meet Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) standards, and conflict with fire marshal requirements. Despite their condition, they remain vital hubs for research. The challenge is to modernize these spaces without resorting to demolition. As designers, we must collaborate with higher education teams, sustainability guidelines, and laboratory directors to create plans that revitalize these buildings to meet both immediate and future needs. Polk Hall, a century-old science building, was originally built in 1924 as a dairy cow husbandry facility and was expanded multiple times, resulting in a structure with more than 10 distinct air handling systems. This renovation focuses on long-term sustainability and flexibility. The design team has conducted planning studies to analyze existing spaces, consolidate and upgrade inefficient systems, and develop strategies for future growth. This session highlights the challenges and successes of renovating such an old, complex building and demonstrates how thoughtful design can bring new life to aging academic laboratories while meeting contemporary needs and sustainability goals.
Repurposing With Purpose: The H.S. Chau Center
The Berkeley, California-based Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) was completed in 2023; the H.S. Chau Center within the IGI Building is a uniquely focused business incubator that provides scientists and entrepreneurs a year of financial support and physical facilities to bring their visions to reality. This presentation will discuss the opportunities and challenges of converting a first-floor administrative suite of a 2012 LEED Gold certified building into a state-of-art entrepreneurial microbiology laboratory. Seizing the opportunities of the high floor-to-floor, overcoming the lack of natural daylight. and learning from what were 2012 cutting edge building technologies, the new H.S. Chau center has become a thriving success. Along the way of completing this fast-track project, there were many valuable lessons to be learned in the delivery of this important and critical program. This session will explore how one team tackled these challenges. They will share their insights on both the path for repurposing and reusing an existing space, as well as their perspectives on what could and should be evaluated when designing new buildings in order to make them more flexible and sustainable for future uses and users.
H4 System Optimization | Safe and Sustainable Ventilation
​Balancing Safety, Sustainability, and Site-Specific Constraints: An HVAC Retrofit Case Study
Replacing laboratory exhaust fans isn't always as simple as selecting a fan model. This case study of the current HVAC renovation and retrofit of Howard Hall at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) will include an overview of the building's 140-year history along with the current renovation project. With exhaust systems for Howard Hall and the adjacent 14-story Bressler Research Building approaching the end of their working life, and recurrent complaints about odors from the neighboring medical center helipad, ambulance staging, and loading docks at the existing air intakes, an HVAC replacement project has been undertaken to consolidate all ventilation systems on the roof. The physical constraints of the existing building and surrounding structures created significant challenges in balancing dispersion safety, fan energy use, and practical fan design. This presentation will compare the various approaches considered to address these challenges, including how wind tunnel testing and wind flow visualization was used at several stages during the design process to uncover some of the unique site constraints. Characterization of risks from laboratory and other exhausts will be explored, how these risks influence the application of best practices for energy use reduction, and how crucial it is to expand the sphere of consideration beyond the building itself.
Practical Options and Code Requirements for Reduced Ventilation in Unoccupied Laboratories
It's a common practice to reduce ventilation rates in laboratories when the workers are not present. Many labs work this way, and some do not. Now it's required by California building code, so more people need to apply the concept. This session will cover the ideas behind ventilation setback and steps to apply it effectively. Ideally, the process starts by considering safety: hazards, procedures and risk. The speaker will discuss the role of the safety officer in approving or restricting ventilation setback. The process continues, evaluating technical options and resulting energy conservation. The next steps, before putting anything into effect, are to plan acceptance tests and the means to manage the system over years of operation.
Validating Demand Control Ventilation Systems
Demand control ventilation (DCV) systems are automated ventilation systems that adjust the amount of outdoor air brought into a building based on real-time occupancy and air quality needs. They use sensors to monitor parameters like carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, relative humidity, and temperature. Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and particulate matter (PM) are more commonly monitored in laboratory environments and critical workspaces. In principle, airflows for these energy-intensive environments are optimized by increasing or decreasing ventilation based on real-time monitoring results. While DCV offers energy efficiency and improved indoor air quality (IAQ), it has several limitations that must be considered during design, installation, and operation. Speakers will discuss these limitations and ways to successfully validate DCV systems, thus ensuring they function as intended and are optimizing energy use. Topics will include: general overview of DCV and its application; limiting factors for DCV systems; how to validate DCV systems; and whether DCV provides effective ventilation.
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