Chiller Plants and Parking Decks: A Natural Combination
To conserve useable land area, a growing trend on campuses is to combine increasing parking needs and chilled water production facilities in a common building. The fact that chiller plants and parking decks are both "utilitarian" facilities appears to make them a natural combination. While it is easy to locate these two facilities adjacent to each other on a common site, it is a bit more challenging to successfully combine their unique functional requirements into one structure.
Affiliated Engineers, Inc. (AEI) was chosen as a consultant in the recent design of three, large campus utility systems that followed this new trend. The first project involved a 2,000-ton chiller plant and a 236-space deck at Williams College (WC) in Williamstown, MA. The second project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in Greensboro, NC, included a 6,000-ton chiller plant and a 650-space deck. The third project at Johns Hopkins Hospital (JHH) in Baltimore, involved a 21,000-ton chiller plant and a 2,200-space deck.