B27, as the building is called, houses 130 chemists, including Ph.D.s and research assistants in a 1:3 ratio supported by six administrative assistants. It contains three 26,000-sf floors, a 16,000-sf penthouse, and a 30,000-sf basement with a lactation room for working mothers. It was sited as part of a four-building complex, including a biology building and a chemistry building, both built in the 1990s, and a research technologies building, which is in the concept phase. All four buildings will be connected through their basements, and at least three will be connected with pedestrian bridges.

Less than half of the $52 million spent to build B27 was for the building itself; the majority went toward specialized mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, the most challenging of which was the air-handling system.

"When you are building a chemistry building, it all starts and ends with the fume hood," says Bill Ford, principal engineer.

The 172 fume hoods in the labs dictate the size of the building's air-handling system, which is designed to move 300,000 CFM. Limited by the small building footprint, the six air-handling units are double-stacked in the basement and exhaust through the penthouse. Each unit is 10 feet high, 20 feet wide, and 60 feet long, three on top and three on the bottom.

"We had six units and broke them up into 36 pieces," says Ford. "It took us nine days to get them in the building."

That configuration required a 20-foot high basement with a concrete foundation that had to be enclosed and heated because it was built in the winter.

Adaptable, Maintainable Floor Plan

The researchers' offices line the outside walls of the building, where 11-foot high ceilings and 8-foot, 6-inch tall windows provide natural lighting for the offices as well as the labs across the corridor. The tall windows required the engineers to fit all ductwork into a narrow overhead space.

"As a company policy, we choose to put offices on the windows and the labs inside," says Les Smith, project manager. "We make the effort to provide the natural lighting to encourage researchers to spend more time in the labs.

"Some companies require a physical wall between an office and a lab," he continues. "We don't do that; we don't want the impediment of the wall, so we designed the air flow very carefully. Air is introduced through the side offices and flows into the labs. We have smoke tested this to confirm that indeed there is no back penetration of any chemicals from the lab areas into the office areas."

On either side of a central corridor on each floor is 6,000 sf of lab space with seamless vinyl flooring and a continuous ceiling grid over the fume hoods. This allows the entire lab area to be configurable to just about any type of workspace.

"We build for what we know about research today, but we have to plan for the research of tomorrow," Smith explains.

In addition, the systems can be maintained without disrupting the researchers. Valves for the variable air volume system and the piping are accessible in the ceiling over the central corridor.

"We went to a lot of trouble to make sure we wouldn't have to rip ceilings apart above chemists," says Smith.

The layout of the building achieves a floorplate efficiency of about 80 percent. Down each side of the central service corridor are two support areas. Personnel corridors run along each side of the building, accessing labs, private offices, and research assistant cubicles. Material flow comes up through the service elevator at the north end of the central corridor. People access the personnel corridors by entering either from the elevator at the south end of the central corridor, or from the connecting link from the other building, at the north end of the corridor.

Each floor contains six 46-x-36-foot lab modules, each of which has an 11-x-11.5-foot support alcove located near the center of the floor plate. The alcove contains pharmacy cabinets, under-counter refrigerators, dishwashers, drying ovens, tabletops for high-performance liquid chromatography, and tabletop space for robotics.

The lab modules are made up of two lab units, each housing one Ph.D. and three research associates. Each unit contains four 12-foot fume hoods— can all be open at the same time— 12 feet of bench space behind the researcher. The units in a module also contain a wash hood and a waste hood.

The lab bench has center shelves suitable for locating instrumentation to keep equipment off the lab bench and leave more room for the researcher to work. When those shelves are above an island work bench, extra lighting is added underneath to avoid casting shadows on the workspace.

Other notable features in the building include numerous ventilated enclosures in the combi-chem area, where the walk-in hoods convert to bench hoods; a suite with six NMR machines; a process lab with two Buchi 100-liter reactors for larger scale reactions; an isolation lab, which is on a separate exhaust for particularly dangerous chemicals; and solvent storage rooms and service rooms on each floor.

Fume Hoods Create Engineering Headaches

The 12-foot fume hoods— attractive feature for scientists— designed to allow maximum safety and workspace for the researcher, and maximum air-flow efficiency for the company, which is a difficult balance to design and maintain.

Each hood is outfitted with eight sashes, four at 21.5 inches wide and four at 12 inches wide; all sashes are 36 inches tall, which slide open horizontally. Researchers are permitted to open only two large sashes at a time to maintain the proper air flow of 100 feet per minute. Magnetic strips attached to the sashes measure the openings and sound an alarm if the opening exceeds 43 inches. A secondary alarm system detects fluctuations in air pressure inside the hoods.

The 12-inch wide sash allows a researcher to wrap his or her arms around the tempered glass and work behind it if an experiment is potentially explosive. This is a Bayer standard practice for improved laboratory safety. Other safety features include solvent storage cabinets and a vacuum pump cabinet underneath the hoods, so the chemist has everything within easy reach. Electrical outlets are installed inside the hoods so chemists don't have to hang cords outside in order to operate equipment. Disconnect switches are located on the front face post.

Despite their $25,000 price tag and careful design, many of the 12-foot hoods failed their ASHRAE 110 tests in unexpected ways: sometimes they failed and sometimes they passed, but when they did fail it was only on the left and right sides of the hoods, while the middle opening passed.

The test involves introducing a tracer gas and determining how well it is contained within the hood by measuring it in parts per million. The temperature of the air affects its density, which was evident from the data.

Air flows into the lab area at 55 degrees and is heated in reheat coils under control of a room thermostat. During the ASHRAE testing it was found that a temperature range of 12 degrees existed at the diffuser, and the hoods were failing only during the cooling part of the cycle.

All the hoods passed the ASHRAE tests when a temperature sensor was installed in the diffuser bank itself to tighten the range of temperatures to within 5 degrees. Smith and Ford still do not know the exact nature of the failures, but they believe the hoods could have been designed to pass ASHRAE testing without altering the control scheme in the labs. The 8- and 6-foot hoods passed the tests without any effect from the air temperature.

Project Team Lends Expertise

With such a complex building, Bayer assembled a varied project team to lend expertise to specific aspects of the design, construction, and commissioning. Together, they were able to complete the project one month early and $1 million under cost.

"Change orders during construction are the usual cause for cost overruns," Ford explains. "This project team managed the change orders very efficiently."

The project team included:
• Richard Rietz, Independent Consultant of Foster City, Calif. (strategic planning)
• Flad & Associates/Affiliated Engineers Inc. (AEI), both of Madison, Wis. (Architect/Engineering)
• Process Facilities Inc. of Boston (Process Laboratory/Engineering)
• Gilbane Building Company of Providence, R.I. (Construction Management)
• BVH Integrated Services of Bloomfield, Conn. (Commissioning Agent)
• Exposure Control Technologies Inc., of Cary, N.C. (ASHRAE Testing)

"A lot of companies don't use a separate lab planning consultant, but Richard is a chemist and offers a different point of view," Smith explains. "He creates a book of the researchers' requirements that we present to the architects which is a very efficient way to kick-off a project."

Bayer also used a third-party commissioning agent for the first time because its facilities manager thought it could be a conflict of interest for the work to be done internally. Ford says the process worked well.

"The last time I did a similar facility, I used a commissioning agent from our construction management company, and it worked out fine. But when you work on a building for two years, you see what you expect to see and you find a way to take the easy route," he says.

Each company was selected for its experience with research facilities, but their true value came from the established working relationships they had with each other.

For example, Rietz has worked on a number of projects with Flad/AEI, Smith says. The project architect from Flad and the engineers from AEI worked together with the project manager from Gilbane on a similar facility for Amgen in Colorado immediately prior to beginning work on B27.

"The most important aspect of this is that we were better able to satisfy the demanding needs of the pharmaceutical researcher," says Smith. "The team spirit within the group fostered a climate of problem resolution to quickly overcome the design, construction, and commissioning hurdles inherent in these projects and significantly contributed to the early completion and cost under-run."

Benchmarking showed that the construction costs were $300 a square foot and $400 including soft costs and other internal costs. The exterior included 8,000 yards of concrete at $400,000 a square foot for a total of $3.2 million. The 1,200 tons of steel, costing $2,300 a ton, was erected in two months. The building contains 30,000 square feet of pre-cast concrete and 30,000 square feet of glass, costing $1 million, on the building exterior.

Lessons Learned

Ford and Smith agree that they will take a closer look at the 12-foot hoods in the next research building they design. Specifically, they would reexamine the control strategy for temperature within the labs, and the edge conditions around the sash opening of the hoods themselves. One costly but effective way to test the hoods in advance is to construct a prototype lab in a warehouse because that would produce truer test results than tests done at the manufacturing plant.

They also admit to a rather fundamental mistake that had to be corrected in the field: installing condensate pump pipes directly to the floor under the NMR lab. The condensate pump cycled about every 10 minutes, shaking the pipe and vibrating the floor it is attached to.

"NMRs are very sensitive to floor vibration," says Smith. "We should not have done that."

And if they could avoid it, they would not pour a concrete foundation in the dead of winter.

Despite those few glitches, the designers and users of the building are pleased with the new facility. In addition to helping Bayer retain the chemists it already employs, the building has help to recruit new researchers. Before it opened, one researcher accepted a job at Bayer for every four offers made. Since June 2001, the ratio has increased to one in three.

By Lisa Wesel

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