This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This proposal requests partial support for the renovation of the Physical Sciences Laboratory Building (PSLB) at Bowling Green State University of Ohio. This is the main research facility of the Department of Chemistry and Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University, and houses several research groups that have received external funding from several agencies. The research productivity of these groups has been affected by an inadequate and antiquated heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in PSLB. This building now suffers from excessive temperature extremes and large thermal fluctuations, particularly in the summer. The building also has problems with vibration from the supply and exhaust fans, which are beyond their original service life. These problems result in a significant amount of instrument downtime and unsafe working conditions. Significant renovations will be made to the building's air handling systems in order to increase cooling capacity, improve filtration, provide new supply and exhaust air valves, retrofit existing fans to variable speed drive, and improved electronic controls. Other upgrades will include replacing the existing pneumatic controls on the heating and cooling plants, and the first phase of a fume hood replacement program that will replace 66 existing fume hoods with energy efficient variable volume fume hoods.
The renovation is expected to improve the conditions for research on materials and devices for fast detection of explosives using luminescent microporous materials, programmable photophysics in metal-organic chromophores, low-power photoluminescence and photochemical upconversion, single-molecule protein dynamics and interfacial electron transfer dynamics, metal-peptide nanoassemblies, and real-time monitoring of photoinduced rearrangement and energy flow in small polyatomic molecules in solution. This renovation will also reduce energy consumption on campus, which will have indirect benefits for research and education.
The research laboratory facilities of the Department of Chemistry and the Center for Photochemical Science at Bowling Green State University are housed in the 5-story Physical Science Laboratory Building. Included are 20 "wet" chemical laboratories, several laser lab facilities, several high-level shared instrumentation facilities and 9 small single-investigator instrumentation labs. The building was constructed in 1984 and the original HVAC system was still in use prior to undertaking this project. That system had exceeded its expected service life, lacked modern monitoring and control points, and ran in a constant-volume mode that was both energy inefficient and taxed the capabilities of the system. Environmental conditions throughout the building had degraded to the point that some labs and instruments were unable to function during extreme summer weather due to high room temperatures and high relative humidity. This NSF project undertook an extensive renovation of the building’s HVAC system. At the heart of the renovation was the transformation of the building from a constant-volume to a variable-volume system. The numerous chemistry laboratories in the building are equipped with fume hoods that exhaust harmful chemical vapors from the room. These hoods must maintain sufficient air velocity at their face to prevent the escape of vapors. With fume hood sashes closed or only slightly opened, safe face velocities can be achieved with relatively small exhaust rates. Larger exhaust rates are needed when the fume hood sashes are opened to their normal working range. While the originally installed HVAC system was unable to take advantage of the variable demands on air exhaust, this project took full advantage of modern digitally controlled supply air and exhaust valves to 1) adjust the rate at which laboratory air was exhausted from the fume hoods according to the position of the sash, 2) supply the appropriate amount of conditioned air to the room to maintain a safe minimum number of room changes per hour, and 3) adjust the supply and exhaust rates according laboratory occupancy. By making these upgrades and modifications, the building would no longer need to supply additional unconditioned air (hot and humid in the summer and cold in the winter) to the research laboratories and the air exchange rates could be accurately controlled to their desired values. Thus both the quality and safety of the laboratory environment could be increased while the overall energy consumption by the building HVAC system could be decreased. The newly renovated system has been performing exactly as expected. Laboratory temperatures were maintained at acceptable values during extreme outside temperature swings. Humidity levels in the laboratories were also significantly reduced. Research labs have not had to temporarily halt activity due to unsatisfactory environmental conditions. These new laboratory conditions will significantly enhance the experience of the numerous students involved in a variety of research projects. The active control of the HVAC system further allows these enhanced environmental conditions to be produced while simultaneously ensuring safe room air exchange rates.
