ASHRAE Seminar Recording
Seminar 11. Upgrading Ventilation in Existing Laboratories
2015 ASHRAE Annual Conference
Operating laboratories present opportunities to improve performance in several directions at once. The opportunities arise from events and trends occurring during the life of the building, including: change in use or priorities; worn, degraded or neglected equipment; increased attention to ventilation requirements; and new generation of equipment and controls. If equipment is in disrepair, fixing that is the first goal. Ventilation engineers and safety professionals reassess the quantity and quality of the ventilation at containment devices and in rooms. Often improvements in exposure control come at lower flow rates. The resulting energy savings pay for the project that enhances ventilation.
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New Life for Old Lab Ventilation Systems
Laboratory Ventilation control systems have been in use now for over 30 years, but today Laboratory Owners must deal with the changing regulatory requirements and business risks related to these systems. In general, laboratory owners seek to avoid downtime from failure of old components, save energy and improve safety management. The presentation will use examples from three lab facility retrofits that accomplished these goals by:- Upgrading with equipment that has better spare parts availability and vendor support
- Managing lab ventilation and fume hood exhaust rates to match exposure risks.
- Accessing the information available in lab ventilation systems by integrating with building management systems
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Upgrade Traditional Chemical Fume Hoods to Improve Containment Performance and Reduce Energy Consumption
People rely on fume hoods to protect them from exposure to airborne materials. All chemical fume hoods should provide equivalent containment performance. Containment can be affected by the design of the fume hood. Traditional fume hoods typically require average face velocities of 100-fpm. High Performance fume hoods enable equivalent containment at velocities as low as 60-fpm. New technology is available to upgrade traditional fume hoods to improve performance and reduce energy consumption by as much as 40%. This presentation will describe how to upgrade traditional fume hoods and realize the benefits of improved safety and reduced costs. -
Lessons Learned from 12 Years of Laboratory Conversions to VAV and Control Retrofits
This presentation covers laboratory conversions to variable air volume (VAV) and/or control upgrades. Over the past 12 years our firm has done retrofits on dozens of teaching and research labs for Stanford University, Cal Tech, UC campuses and others. For the majority of these labs we have pre- and post-retrofit data and have developed tools to help us and others assess the potential energy impact of the retrofits. In addition to the energy savings other benefits like lab safety, system flexibility and acoustics, to name a few, will be presented.