A large Midwestern university recently undertook growth plans for two major areas of development for its campus: a medical center and central academic areas. Providing utilities to these new developments on campus required infrastructure improvements, particularly for chilled water service.
To address this need and comply with the institution’s policies on energy efficiency, the university implemented a centralized chilled water plant approach. As the schedule of the two developments was very tight, two chilled water plants were constructed in a short time period. The design development and implementation of these two facilities involved operations and maintenance standards with a widely divergent facility-specific set of design constraints and application requirements, resulting in two distinctly different plants.