Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Upgrades its Cooling Tower
The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center is home to several aircraft hangars with an exhibited collection of thousands of aviation and space artifacts as well as a theater, observation tower, and restoration facilities. With extensive facilities and an HVAC system that could not keep pace with demands, it became clear to the museum and consulting engineers at AECOM, who managed the project, that a new HVAC system was desperately needed.
The museum, located in Chantilly Virginia, was supported by cooling towers that were old and lacked adequate capacity to serve the building’s increasing cooling load. Site conditions did not allow for a larger cooling tower footprint to meet the increased load. To deliver enough chilled water at peak efficiency and to fix the original hydronic design for the towers, facility managers were faced with elevating the towers by 6 feet. While solving the HVAC system performance challenge, this created a service dilemma: how to safely and efficiently perform routine inspection and maintenance on cooling towers that were 25 feet above ground.