flexiblefullpage
billboard
interstitial1
catfish1
Currently Reading

Medical Data Center Sets High Bar for BIM Design Team

Medical Data Center Sets High Bar for BIM Design Team

The construction of a new data center becomes a test case for BIM’s ability to enhance project delivery across an entire medical campus.


By By Jeff Yoders, Contributing Editor | February 10, 2011
This article first appeared in the February 2011 issue of BD+C.

In the last six years, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in Little Rock, has experienced unprecedented growth, including the development of more than $425 million in new or expanded facilities. UAMS is Arkansas’s only comprehensive academic health center, with five colleges, a graduate school, a new 550,000-sf hospital tower (completed in 2009), six centers of excellence, and a statewide network of regional centers. It’s also the state’s largest public employer, providing jobs to more than 10,000 Arkansas healthcare professionals.

But by 2009 all of that growth was taking its toll on the campus’s existing data centers, which had to securely store most of the hospital system’s sensitive medical records.

“In the last five years we’ve had about 35% growth,” said Mark Kenneday, UAMS’s Vice Chancellor of Campus Operations. “Our old main data center was pretty crude, a reflection of the growth we experienced.” The medical center’s IT infrastructure program, he explained, was being developed around the idea of a three-legged stool, with redundancies in all three data centers; if any single location were to go down, another of the centers could pick up the slack.

However, only two of the data center “legs” were in place. Clearly, a new primary data center was needed. That’s when building information modeling came into play.

Rather than just plan and construct another building to house massive racks of servers for a quick fix, Kenneday and the operations team at UAMS looked at the new data center as an opportunity to expand the university’s BIM design standards and create a building that would efficiently serve the UAMS campus for at least the next hundred years.

Even before Kenneday arrived at UAMS in 2007, the medical center required Building Teams to submit designs in Autodesk’s Revit BIM platform. But the Primary Data Center project expanded the 3D BIM requirement in its contracts and bid documents to the entire Building Team. All general contractors had to bid the project as a BIM carry-through. BIM precertification was also required of every architect and engineer on the project.

“We really pushed them into a corner so they would take the responsibility,” Kenneday said. “We already had all of our schematic designs done in BIM. A more profound delivery was a very natural next step. When you realize you have this giant data repository you don’t know what to do with, the BIM model allows you to put some of that information into data knowledge for decision-making down the road.”

MEP and structural design engineer TME Engineering, Little Rock, led the design team for the $4.9 million, 15,000-sf PDC with Kirchner Architecture, also of Little Rock, providing the architectural design. Kenneday said that, notwithstanding the importance of the architectural aspects of the building, it was the information stored inside the PDC that was “vitally important” to the university, which is why the engineers were given primacy on the design team.

In addition to requiring an efficient power usage efficiency (PUE) rating of 4.0 for the project, UAMS further demanded that the Building Team turn over its completed models for use in managing the facility management and providing emergency first response once the building was completed.

“When they deliver their BIM model, it becomes a UAMS product,” Kenneday said. “It becomes a part of our OEM delivery. We’ve just now started to get a repository of BIM information for our latest projects. We have a unique position here in Little Rock, in that we’re the big dog when it comes to healthcare construction, so we can do that.”

TME and Kirchner delivered a design that featured a portfolio of engineering systems: variable volume air handling units to condition the air in the Primary Data Center’s raised floor area, hot aisle enclosures to minimize cold air bypass, a dedicated ventilation unit to provide humidity control, and a chilled water system—in fact, a variable primary low-flow, high-delta-T chilled water system with energy-efficient water-cooled chillers. The heat from the data center’s raised floor area is transferred from the chilled water system to the heating water system using a heat pump chiller/heater; it then is used to heat other buildings on campus.

“We were going for a high energy rating and part of that was helped by the BIM process,” said Mark Mergenschroer, BIM development coordinator at TME. “Architectural, MEP, and structural models were all done in Revit, and it was a learning process for some of the team, since this was the first full BIM project in Arkansas. Was our model perfect all of the time? No, but the team effort and the process was.”

General contractor Vratsinas Construction Co., Little Rock, worked with its subcontractors to provide detailed shop drawings based on information from the Revit models. Project stakeholders and Building Team members could virtually walk through the planned data center and comment on the design thanks to a virtual model made in the Unity 2 gaming engine. (To try the walk-through, go to: http://www.tmecorp.com/unity2.)

The project was completed on schedule and opened last October, 18% under budget. TME was able to beat the university’s PUE target of 4.0, bringing the project in with a PUE rating of 1.36.  More importantly, the data center can increase its storage capacity as UAMS continues to grow. The initial buildout uses only about 50% of its server capacity, with the ability to add another 50% as IT services are expanded. The final Revit models are being used for facilities management and planning new UAMS infrastructure.

That capacity will be needed, as the period of growth has not finished at UAMS. Construction started last year on a four-floor expansion to the Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging, an existing, four-story Alzheimer’s disease research and treatment facility on the Little Rock campus. Planning is also under way to renovate 24,000 sf in the former main hospital building for the new UAMS Center for Clinical and Translational Research. Both projects use the same BIM requirements used on the Primary Data Center.

“I would prefer for our campus to take a lead position when it comes to BIM,” Kenneday said. “We want to be on the front of the train, rather than on the back. Or under it.” BD+C

Be sure to catch the latest blog from Jeff (“BIMBoy”) Yoders at: www.BDCnetwork.com.

Related Stories

K-12 Schools | Aug 29, 2024

Designing for dyslexia: How architecture can address neurodiversity in K-12 schools

Architects play a critical role in designing school environments that support students with learning differences, particularly dyslexia, by enhancing social and emotional competence and physical comfort. Effective design principles not only benefit students with dyslexia but also improve the learning experience for all students and faculty. This article explores how key design strategies at the campus, classroom, and individual levels can foster confidence, comfort, and resilience, thereby optimizing educational outcomes for students with dyslexia and other learning differences.

Museums | Aug 29, 2024

Bjarke Ingels' Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art conceived as village of 12 pavilions

The 60,000-sm Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art in Suzhou, Jiangsu, China recently topped out. Designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), the museum is conceived as a village of 12 pavilions, offering a modern interpretation of the elements that have defined the city’s urbanism, architecture, and landscape for centuries. 

Adaptive Reuse | Aug 28, 2024

Cities in Washington State will offer tax breaks for office-to-residential conversions

A law passed earlier this year by the Washington State Legislature allows developers to defer sales and use taxes if they convert existing structures, including office buildings, into affordable housing.

Industrial Facilities | Aug 28, 2024

UK-based tire company plans to build the first carbon-neutral tire factory in the U.S.

ENSO, a U.K.-based company that makes tires for electric vehicles, has announced plans to build the first carbon-neutral tire factory in the U.S. The $500 million ENSO technology campus will be powered entirely by renewable energy. The first-of-its-kind tire factory aims to be carbon neutral without purchased offsets, using carbon-neutral raw materials and building materials. 

Architects | Aug 28, 2024

KTGY acquires residential high-rise specialist GDA Architects

KTGY, an award-winning design firm focused on architecture, interior design, branded environments and urban design, announced that it has acquired GDA Architects, a Dallas-based architectural firm specializing in high rise residential, hospitality and industrial design.

K-12 Schools | Aug 26, 2024

Windows in K-12 classrooms provide opportunities, not distractions

On a knee-jerk level, a window seems like a built-in distraction, guaranteed to promote wandering minds in any classroom or workspace. Yet, a steady stream of studies has found the opposite to be true.

Building Technology | Aug 23, 2024

Top-down construction: Streamlining the building process | BD+C

Learn why top-down construction is becoming popular again for urban projects and how it can benefit your construction process in this comprehensive blog.

Airports | Aug 22, 2024

Portland opens $2 billion mass timber expansion and renovation to its international airport  

This month, the Portland International Airport (PDX) main terminal expansion opened to passengers. Designed by ZGF for the Port of Portland, the 1 million-sf project doubles the capacity of PDX and enables the airport to welcome 35 million passengers per year by 2045.

Adaptive Reuse | Aug 22, 2024

6 key fire and life safety considerations for office-to-residential conversions

Office-to-residential conversions may be fraught with fire and life safety challenges, from egress requirements to fire protection system gaps. Here are six important considerations to consider.

Resiliency | Aug 22, 2024

Austin area evacuation center will double as events venue

A new 45,000 sf FEMA-operated evacuation shelter in the Greater Austin metropolitan area will begin construction this fall. The center will be available to house people in the event of a disaster such as a major hurricane and double as an events venue when not needed for emergency shelter.

boombox1
boombox2
native1

More In Category


Urban Planning

Bridging the gap: How early architect involvement can revolutionize a city’s capital improvement plans

Capital Improvement Plans (CIPs) typically span three to five years and outline future city projects and their costs. While they set the stage, the design and construction of these projects often extend beyond the CIP window, leading to a disconnect between the initial budget and evolving project scope. This can result in financial shortfalls, forcing cities to cut back on critical project features.



Libraries

Reasons to reinvent the Midcentury academic library

DLR Group's Interior Design Leader Gretchen Holy, Assoc. IIDA, shares the idea that a designer's responsibility to embrace a library’s history, respect its past, and create an environment that will serve student populations for the next 100 years.

halfpage1

Most Popular Content

  1. 2021 Giants 400 Report
  2. Top 150 Architecture Firms for 2019
  3. 13 projects that represent the future of affordable housing
  4. Sagrada Familia completion date pushed back due to coronavirus
  5. Top 160 Architecture Firms 2021