Laboratory & Life Sciences
Keck Graduate Institute Building 535 VRF & Lab Controls Retrofit
VRF retrofit and lab controls upgrade at a graduate research building.
Client
Keck Graduate Institute
Location
Claremont, CA
Service Line
Designed it, then won it — a VRF and EcoStruxure retrofit of a working life-sciences lab, fume-hood controls and all.
In a lab building, the part that matters most is the air.
Building 535 at Keck Graduate Institute is full of laboratories: fume hoods, venturi valves, the kind of airflow that has to be exactly right or the science stops. KGI is the applied life-sciences member of the Claremont Colleges, and the work inside 535 spans its research areas in biotechnology and pharmaceutical development, bioprocessing, and medical diagnostics. Recombinant proteins, cell culture, the diagnostic-assay and instrumentation work that fills a modern wet lab. When the building’s aging HVAC and pneumatic controls needed replacing, Athena did something we like doing — we engineered the full design, HVAC and building automation both, then bid the construction against the open market and won the job we’d drawn.
The mechanical design landed on VRF. Athena ran the options against other manufacturers, Carrier included, and only LG’s system fit the footprint the existing building left us. So we moved the building off its central chilled-water plant and onto VRF. Out went five old air handlers, two condensing units, two boilers, and a heating-hot-water pump; in went five new AAON air handlers with DX coils, five LG VRF condensing units, two RayPak boilers, and two hot-water pumps on ABB drives. We reused the existing ductwork and piping where we could, flushed and cleaned the hot-water system, added no new panelboards, and left the old chilled-water plant in place for KGI to reclaim. Routing refrigerant and control lines ahead of the crane days kept the building’s downtime short.
The whole building on one front-end — with room for the rest of the campus.
We pulled the pneumatic controls out entirely and replaced them with a Schneider EcoStruxure Building Operation system: new automation servers, an enterprise server, and a workstation running the air handlers, the VRF, the hot-water plant, the VAV zones, and the exhaust fans from a single front-end. The enterprise server was sized to grow, so KGI can fold other campus buildings onto the same system later without starting over.
When a fume-hood sash moves, the valve has to respond right now — to hold face velocity and protect the researcher and the work in front of them.
In a lab building, the part that matters most is the air. Bioprocessing and protein work, cell culture, diagnostic assays — that research depends on hoods that contain solvents and biologics and on conditions stable enough that the room never ruins the experiment. So Athena retrofitted the existing laboratory venturi valves (Phoenix Controls) with fast actuators and brought the fume-hood controls into the EcoStruxure integration alongside everything else. The speed is the point: when a fume-hood sash moves, the valve has to respond right now to hold face velocity and keep containment honest, protecting the researcher and the work in front of them. And because the hoods and lab equipment can’t run while their controls are being swapped, the work was sequenced around the labs, room by room, so the science lost as little time as possible.
When it was done, KGI had a single EcoStruxure front-end running all of Building 535: labs, hoods, VRF, and plant, installed by the same firm that designed it.
Client: Keck Graduate Institute. Delivery: Design, then competitive-bid build — Athena as prime contractor. Equipment: LG VRF condensing units, AAON air handlers, RayPak boilers, ABB drives. Scope: chilled-water-to-VRF mechanical replacement, Schneider EcoStruxure Building Operation controls, and laboratory venturi-valve and fume-hood controls integration (Phoenix Controls, fast actuators) — self-performed by Athena Engineering.
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