airflow. These are devices that meter and regulate
the flow of air. You insert the unit into a duct and
then you can very accurately and quickly change
the air within its rated operating range.
Grilles and diffusers are another part of our design
palette. For labs, its important to make informed
selections on these products and their locations
because the type of diffusers necessary in a lab
will be very different than those in office spaces. In
office spaces, diffuser mix the air. That’s undesirable
for labs because if you have a spill you don’t want to
recirculate that plume of evaporated contaminants
within the breathing zone. It is ideal to sweep the
air through the room in a controlled direction from
cleaner spaces to dirtier spaces.
The other side of ventilation design, which I believe
P2S is a world innovator in, is what happens outside
the building. The exhaust goes through a fan, goes
through a stack and eventually goes up into the
sky. The outside air also comes from the sky, so
the atmosphere around us acts as our common air
reservoir, taking air in and blowing air out. You want
to make sure that you take air in from a location
that’s not going to be pulling in contaminated air
or minimizes how much is pulled back in from the
exhaust. We’re world leaders in this area, I really
You want to make sure that
you take air in from a location
that’s not going to be pulling in
contaminated air or minimizes
how much is pulled back in from
the exhaust.
mean that. We validate a lot of our designs through
wind tunnel testing. We work with specialists to
create scale models of lab buildings we’re working
on. These models are functional; there’s a port
where we put in the test gas and we can see how it
flows. We excel at modeling and designing for what
happens outside of the building.
Building codes aren’t well suited for specialty design
applications like laboratories, which have unique
hazards and design considerations. Each lab is
bespoke and even if the program is the same, the
shape of the building, the topography, the local
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wind conditions could be unique and require special
consideration on how to disperse the exhaust. We’re
experienced in how to design our exhaust systems to
achieve better air quality performance and minimize
energy use. We use passive enhancement design
strategies that allow us to throw the air further
away, using less energy. One of our innovations,
which we developed during design competitions,
was to cluster the stacks together. There’s research
that suggests that if you take exhaust stacks at
similar velocity and terminate them within a critical
radius of each other, then the plumes from each
of the stacks will merge into a mega-plume with
the momentum of each exhaust stack combined to
disperse air further into the atmosphere. If you can
collect all the stacks together, they’ll throw further
together than they would apart. By doing that,
we can get better performance, at lower cost and
without using more energy intensive strategies.
What are some of the applicable codes and
standards that you must consider in Lab design?
Most labs are held accountable to the local city or
state codes. Most codes don’t heavily regulate labs
because there’s not a lot of prescriptive requirements
for scientific processes. Standards are more
influential on how to design things. There’s a U.S.
standard called ANSI Z9.5 which is the lab ventilation
standard. Z9.5 establishes design criteria and
guidance for common design applications. There
are also standards for the containment devices that
we’re involved with. ASHRAE Standard 110 deals with
how to test fume hood containment performance.
How is designing for a research laboratory in a
University different from designing for a clinical lab
located in a hospital?
Their programs would be different. The clinical lab
could have people from the outside involved, people
who may not be employees. Clinical labs would
likely have the same processes repeated as part of
a production system, while medical research labs
would be more varied to suit the needs for flexible
spaces to accommodate changes in research
over time. Since the programs are different, the
equipment used would be different and utilities
would change appropriately. Clinical labs may also
have special processes that require compliance
with cGMP (current good manufacturing practice)
regulations. These apply to parts of the lab that
produce medicines that people ingest. If a lab is
used to manufacture the medicine for trials, there
would be a cGMP facility, which may be similar
to an ISO 6 or 7 cleanroom. Medical research labs