ASHRAE Journal - June 2020 - 15

TECHNICAL FEATURE

FIGURE 1 Floor plan of the 14,700 ft2 (1366 m2) wet chemistry research facility.

Ofﬁce
109B
Storage
104C

Conference Conference
Room
Room
104A
109A
Hallway
104B

TYP

Kitchenette
105 Corridor Stair
Jan and
110
Storage Men
Women 104
106 108
107

Lab
119

Lab
115

111A

Lab
121

Electrical
126
Data and Phone
125
Receiving and
Storage
124
TYP

111B

Corridor
111

Corridor
102
101
Vestibule

Lab
117

Lab
113

Vestibule
127
203

Lab
116
Ofﬁce
103

Lab
112

Secure
Gas
Bottle
Storage

Lab
114

Lab
120

Lab
118

90-Day
Storage
122

Mechanical
123

TYP

height is maintained until a higher ceiling becomes
necessary.
A common approach to lab design is to provide corridors for staff access and a separate corridor to locate
equipment such as compressed gas cylinders, vacuum
pumps, point-of-use chillers, etc. At GPCL, both functions were incorporated into a single, 16 ft (4.9 m) wide
corridor. This reduced the overall building footprint,
decreased total HVAC airﬂow and cooling loads and
enabled the design of a mechanical mezzanine (see last
paragraph in this section), all of which contributed to
reducing the total construction cost without sacriﬁcing
utility of operations. While colocating equipment in an
access corridor may not be practical in a large lab facility, it has worked very well in GPCL.
GPCL houses 10 lab spaces, ofﬁce space, two small
conference rooms, receiving/storage area and mechanical and electrical support spaces (Figure 1). Each lab is
720 ft2 (67 m2)in size and contains up to four benchtop
fume hoods, a lab sink and a combination of ﬁxed and
mobile casework. Fume hoods are 5 ft or 6 ft (1.5 m
or 1.8 m) wide with vertical sashes and were selected
based on research requirements. Lab doorways are
60 in. (1.5 m) wide with a 36 in. (0.8 m) door and separate 24 in. (0.6 m) operable leaf.
Walls separating adjacent labs were provided with
a preframed area for a doorway to allow future direct

access between labs. Also, separation walls were
designed to be non-load bearing and free of structural
braced frames, electrical conduits and mechanical piping to allow the creation of a single, larger lab space
out of two standard size labs at minimal cost. The use
of primarily mobile rather than ﬁxed casework along
the perimeter walls and at the center island further
increases the ﬂexibility and adaptability of each space.
Research activities at PNNL frequently involve secret
or classiﬁed work, or processes and experiments that
are carried out over a period of months and even years.
Interruptions to such work due to maintenance activities can be extremely disruptive and costly. This issue
was addressed by including a mezzanine (see Figure 2 and
Photo 1) above the central corridor to house equipment
that typically is located above the ceiling: air terminal
units, zone hydronic coils, isolation valves and dampers,
DDC controls, etc. By locating this equipment outside
the lab spaces, the need for operations personnel to
access the labs for maintenance purposes is signiﬁcantly
reduced and research operations continue with fewer
interruptions.

HVAC Design
Research laboratories have unique and challenging requirements for control of space temperature
and pressure, supply and exhaust airﬂow rates, ﬁre
J U N E 2020

ashrae.org

ASHRAE JOURNAL

https://www.ashrae.org/

ASHRAE Journal - June 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal - June 2020