Tuesday, April 30th, 2019
Set to open in 2020, the massive 530,000 square foot facility will house approximately two-thirds of Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and will be among the most cutting-edge facilities of its kind in the world.
Specializing in custom high-pressure atomizing humidifiers, GoFog was selected as the basis of design to assist with creating a system to maintain the various relative humidity requirements throughout the building’s laboratories and was later awarded the contract to supply the system. With over 300,000 CFM of outside air being introduced from multiple air handling units (AHU’s), a single Fog Pump Skid located in the basement mechanical room was provided to feed over 10 GPM (5,000 lbs/hr) of reverse osmosis water at 1,000 psi to the multiple motorized ball valves mounted near each AHU. These valves allow high pressure water to the fog nozzle manifolds located inside the AHU’s and are staged based on a demand signal provided by the building management system (BMS). The high-pressure skid has (2) pumps that operate on alternating duty/standby, allowing for a highly efficient redundant system that uses less than 10 HP. More details on the Valve Staging Rack and High Availability Pump Skid can be found here.
In addition to humidifying the labs during the winter and transitional seasons, this same pump skid is also utilized in the summer months to increase the efficiency of the building’s HVAC system by providing indirect evaporative cooling for the supply air that is introduced into the building. This is accomplished by a secondary set of fog nozzle manifolds inside the exhaust units that saturate the exhausted room air before it enters an energy recovery coil (ERC). This energy recovery system has a coil placed in the exhaust air steam that transfers a percentage of the cooler room temperature air from the labs, to a second coil located in the supply air stream. This sensible transfer pre-cools the hot outside air coming into the supply AHU’s without adding any unwanted moisture. The addition of fogging in the exhaust section increases the cooling effect by over 10°F with minimal cost impact since the high-pressure pump skid is already in place and is normally not in use during the humid summers in Massachusetts.
Interested on how a GoFog System may work for you? Please email us at [email protected] or speak directly with an expert by calling 803.220.0101.