GLUMAC - Engineers for a sustainable future

Diana Volovelskay, San Francisco Marketing Coordinator

A progressive approach that included unique design elements was taken in the design of the North Pavilion project -- a part of Providence Portland Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. Glumac is working on this large project with Zimmer Gunsul Frasca (ZGF), a leader in healthcare architectural design. A Metier Alliance partner, ccrd, is also involved, providing peer review. The new 485,000 sf facility will boast a number of energy-efficient design strategies and sustainable technologies that will deliver substantial annual operating savings.  Measures being analyzed for energy savings include such strategies as daylighting, window overhangs to reduce cooling loads, evaporative pre-cooling to temper supply air, and night flushing during the summer to cool down unoccupied spaces overnight.

Providence Health System chose Glumac for its expertise in energy modeling and design of highly efficient systems. By calculating the life cycle cost benefits over a 10-year period and financing the incremental cost outside of the construction budget, the high-performance design was deemed to be a wise business investment. Energy efficiency measures with attractive paybacks will show even higher rates of return with Oregon tax credits and incentives from the Energy Trust of Oregon.

This building, with a projected completion date in the later part of 2007, will feature many state-of-the-art mechanical design elements. One such element is the implementation of a 100% outside air system with high accuracy airflow terminal units. These units provide constant pressure relationships to minimizing the risk for spreading infection -- which is becoming a greater concern inside hospitals.

A new and improved type of air handler unit called Fan Wall Technology will also be used in the design, thanks to a pre-purchase agreement obtained through Turner Logistics. This is a unique move, as this is an emerging technology and it is rare to see it used on larger projects. In lieu of large house centrifugal fans, Fan Wall Technology utilizes an array, or wall, of centrifugal fans to increase fan efficiency and reduce horsepower related to redundancy. Fan Wall Technology also solves a major maintenance issue by allowing individual fan replacement even while the air handler units are operating.

The North Pavilion will feature a cancer treatment and research hospital partially funded by a generous National Institute of Health (NIH) grant, as well as a 9,000 sf Vivarium including an (ABSL 3) animal bio-safety level 3 suite. There will be 250 patient rooms, with build out of 100 of those rooms, 21 operating rooms including cardiac, orthopedic, and neurosurgery, a 50,000 sf oncology outpatient clinic, radiation oncology services including 3 linear accelerators, two 3.0T MRIs, 1 gamma knife, a high dose radiation (HDR) suite, a 50,000 sf research lab with other lab research support facilities.

There will also be a centralized uninterruptible power source (UPS) to aid in the storage of all transcriptions, MRIs, etc. This technology is state of the art and on the same level as data center UPS systems.

According to Leonard Klein, Larry Hengesh, and Michael Henning, the mechanical and electrical design leads from the Glumac Portland office, this has been a seamless collaborative design process between the architect, the owner€™s design and construction group, facilities, and the general contractor. Providence Health System conducted both energy and eco-charrettes to brainstorm design strategies, to build commitment and vision within the design team and community. It has been a very progressive approach to solving maintainability, flexibility, cost and other program issues.

M-Color is being used during the collaborative design process. It is a program architects have historically used and engineers have rarely used for presenting concept ideas. Pressurization diagrams were created, which are graphical in nature and colorized to visually represent the required pressure relationships between different functional spaces. The use of this graphics program improved the quality of the documentation presented concepts more clearly, and will be incorporated as part of the final building management system (BMS).