Howard University Interdisciplinary Research Building, Washington, DC

“Size:
81,000 SF

Highlights:
LEED Gold Certified
mechanical/plumbing design
”

The building is designed to be home to Howard University’s core science and research facilities. It is an important piece of the University’s Academic Renewal Program. The building serves as a catalyst to spur development of the southern end of University’s Central Campus.

This 81,000SF, LEED Gold Certified, four-story facility includes development biology and stem cell research lab, a natural product chemistry lab in addition to atmospheric physics and climatology, immunology and nanotechnology research labs.

The science building houses trans-disciplinary research conducted by teams comprised of scientists, engineers and biomedical researchers from various departments. These teams focus on program areas such as biomedical imaging, computational biology and bioinformatics, nanotechnology, proteomics and sickle cell, stem cell cancer and gene array studies.

SETTY provided mechanical and plumbing design for this state-of-the art facility. The scope includes designing an Ultra-Pure Water (UPW) system for a 3,000 SF fabrication clean room tool supply application. SETTY designed a ASTM type E-1 electronics water grade with a system capacity of 40 gallons per minute applying the ASTM D-5127-13 design standard.

The packaged UPW system includes pre-filtration with RO feed water, water softeners, activated carbon filtration, bacteria UV unit, storage tank, distribution pumps, TOC UV unit and mixed bed deionizers. The building is designed and constructed to mitigate the projects site’s vibration and acoustical interference, as well as radio frequency and electromagnetic interferences (RFI/EMI), which present potential problems to the nano-research undertakings.