The Kelley Engineering Center, a 155,000-sf “green” building and home to the rapidly growing School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at OSU, provides labs, classrooms, and offices for more than 360 professors and graduate students. The architecture, LEED™-Gold (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) design, and collaborative features make OSU’s newest facility a campus focal point.

Collaboration is Key

As the College of Engineering builds a top-25 program, it emphasizes collaborative, innovative teaching and research that involves not only OSU faculty, staff, and students, but long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with industry leaders as well. The new building facilitates easy access for business visitors, which reflects the emphasis on developing greater bridges to industry.

“The Kelley Engineering Center is the crown jewel of the top-25 campaign,” says John Gremmels, senior design and construction manager at OSU. “Architecturally, it embodies the emphasis on an engineering education that is centered around people working together to create the ideas and innovation necessary to build a better future. It is a catalyst for collaboration and a building designed to fuel innovation.”

Goals Translate to Energy Efficiency

The goals of this $45-million project were to address critical and qualitative space requirements, modernize facilities to become a cornerstone for engineering research, and fulfill University-mandated green building requirements.

“One design challenge was to create a humane environment symbolic of the advanced systems and research housed within the facility, while fitting in and relating to the historic OSU campus architecture,” said Gremmels.  “Trying to retrofit an old building with new systems such as efficient climate control, standby and UPS power, and wi-fi systems becomes more difficult than building a new building, and we had a shortage of research and office space that needed to be addressed.”

The innovative design and operating features for achieving ultra-high energy-use efficiencies were achieved with the late addition of a heat recovery system and HVAC operations sequences as well as stringent construction controls in the building shell and under-floor plenum. This resulted in first-year occupancy energy use at less than 40 percent of state energy requirements. While the target was 50 percent, the goal was exceeded through an additional combination of strategies including atrium-based natural ventilation and steam heating, night flushing, heat/cold sinks, ample natural atrium lighting and skylights, and occupancy-sensor controls for both climate and lighting control.

The under-floor plenum system has approximately 18 inches of under-floor space throughout most of the building, resulting in no overhead HVAC ducting. This allows a very low pressure, .05 inches of loss from outside the floor to the floor; compared with a medium pressure duct system in the ceiling at 1.5. There was a goal of 80 percent pressure-holding efficiency on the floor system and it achieved 95 percent, with only a five percent loss of air. The main advantage of the under-floor plenum system is it allows for cooling or heating with a five-degree differential in temperature versus 15 degrees required from overhead ductwork.

There are three zones of natural ventilation, which flows through the offices directly without fan assistance. Air flows from the exterior offices and basement, from the graduate spaces and into the atrium, and from louvers as a stack affect and out external exhaust louvers. The entire building is naturally ventilated 80 percent of the time. With the exception of the labs and servers, mechanical heating and cooling is necessary only 20 percent of the time.

While the atrium is naturally lighted and ventilated, the mixture of electrical engineering labs are mechanically heated and cooled. The labs are in the interior on one side of the building, resulting in little air loss. The building is mechanically heated by campus steam and cooled by chillers.

The offices have a fin tube radiator behind the operable windows. That water is heated by the heat recovery system and draws air without a fan from under the floor. All of these components are integrated. Occupants can heat or cool the room by choosing to open the windows or by operating the building’s systems, but not both.

During night flushing, all of the office windows and transoms open automatically and the air handlers blow air through the graduate research spaces. The louvers in the atrium open and a large volume of air is pushed through the building, resulting in overall cooler temperatures.

The building’s roof is Energy Star-compliant with photovoltaic panels. Additional solar water heating provides a small amount of green energy, while the remainder of the green power is purchased through a local utility.

A rainwater collection system collects water for building sewage conveyance and on-site irrigation. Native plants reduce the amount of irrigation water required. Water-efficient fixtures also reduce the building’s water usage; the two combined reduce the baseline potable water usage by 65 percent.

Recycled materials are used in the concrete, steel, carpet, acoustical suspended ceilings, masonry, glass, and gypsum wallboard. At least 20 percent of the building material was manufactured, extracted, or harvested regionally. Heat-attracting materials such as exposed steel, granite, and concrete act as a heat or cold sink.

Low-emitting materials such as adhesives, sealants, paints, coatings, and carpet systems, with no materials containing added urea-formaldehyde, are found throughout the building. A carbon monoxide monitoring system with operational adjustments is part of the building’s design.

The Kelley Engineering Center is on track to be the greenest academic engineering building in the nation. In fact, this building uses 50 percent less energy than comparable science buildings. It is the first Gold LEED-certified research building on the West Coast.

“We were going for a silver certification, but we found that it wasn’t that difficult to get the gold certification just in the normal process of meeting our goals,” says Gremmels.

Features for Cutting-Edge Research

The building is bisected by the focal point, a four-story atrium, and includes wireless communications technology in the classrooms, flexible learning laboratories, and office clusters. Common areas that encourage communication include “plug-and-learn” alcoves built into spaces often underutilized in traditional building designs, six open nooks with comfortable sofas and chairs, small tables, and a piano. From sky bridges and hallway alcoves to glass-walled conference rooms, graduate student offices clustered around research laboratories, and a centrally located e-café in the atrium, the Center’s layout encourages occupants to cross paths and brainstorm new ideas that will translate into cutting-edge research.

In a dramatic departure from most other academic engineering buildings, the labs in the new building are not dedicated to individual faculty members. Instead, each lab is the central element of a “research-learning suite” surrounded by 155 faculty and graduate student offices, and is assigned to a specific research project. Within the labs, there is a radio frequency-shielded laboratory, a wet laboratory with fume hoods, and six electronics laboratories.

The support spaces consist of 2,200 open computer spaces for department students, in addition to server rooms with heat recovery systems to provide constant loads. The shared spaces include 12 conference rooms, two 60+ person classrooms, two large theater-style classrooms, two “reconfigurable” class/conference rooms, and nine seminar classrooms.

Optimizing the Performance of Green Building

Some of the findings and lessons learned on how occupants react to, use, and eventually optimize the performance of a cutting-edge, green building were those of a “human nature.” There was a training process to discourage people from turning lights off before leaving a room, instead, trusting that the auto function would do its job.

“It took some getting used to,” says Gremmels. “You don’t get a whoosh of air conditioning or a whoosh of heating in natural ventilation. So, we had the people trained to turn their switch to normal or auto and trust that the timer will turn it off in 18 minutes. If the room and lights were turned off, the room would be put in a dormant status, letting the temperature fall to between 55 and 78 degrees. Auto or normal will tell the occupancy sensor to look for you if you are there and keep the temperature between 68 and 76 degrees. Natural ventilation would take a few hours to heat a room from 55 to 68 degrees.”

Another issue was that planned operating hours were different than actual operating hours. This resulted in a wider range of night flushing hours, after 10:00 p.m. on weeknights and 8:00 p.m. on weekends, allowing night flushing with air as cool as 45 degrees to avoid turning the chillers on at night.

Finally, a gradual build up to full occupancy and a highly efficient building leads to a sequence of operational issues of a 24-hour load demand. One area of compromise was in ventilation.  Occupants can use a manual dial, resulting in operable windows that creates a draft with the transom open, or use the under-floor air distribution system to allow for more individual control of space, but not both at the same time.

"An integrated, holistic design process was utilized to develop cost-effective building concepts to reduce energy use, including natural daylight and natural ventilation throughout, while promoting communication and collaboration between faculty and students,” says Gremmels.

By Lisa Brown