Re: new facility planning flow rate air conditioning

[Peter March]

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Hi,

We're going through a similar thing for our super resolution suite and my advice
would be to tell the air-conditioning people the temperature you want the rooms to
stay at and then make them do their job. It shouldn't be you telling them how to
sort out an air conditioning issue. Surely they should know how to calculate that if
they can measure the room volume and you've already given them the heat output
of the microscopes. You wouldn't take a car to the garage and have to tell the
mechanic how to fix your car.

Most air conditioning units are a pain for the microscope companies as the air flow
causes vibration on the microscope and can actually cause more problems than the
room temperature. There is a very simple solution to that and I'd really push your
company to install an air sock system. This is just like it sounds : the air blows
along a long material pipe and blows out through the material so that there are no
direct air flows in the room. Costs are about the same as a normal fin based
system but work far better in a microscope suite. You should also make sure the
system will run 24/7 and isn't linked in any way to the main building
cooling/heating control times. Our building only runs 7.30am-6.30am Mon-Fri !! so
not very useful for a microscope suite.

Hope that helps,

Peter

--
Dr Peter March
Bioimaging Senior Experimental Officer
Faculty of Life Sciences
The University of Manchester
The Michael Smith Building
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PT

Office: 0161 27 51571
Mobile (from a University phone): 77 51571
Mobile (from outside the University): 07747 118447

[Philip Nicovich]

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We had a hard time finding any published guidelines for air flow in
fluorescence microscopy labs, but a bit more for EM and AFM.  For those,
these papers were helpful:

doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2006.04.017
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668632.003.0011

In there, a upper limit for flow rate of 0.15 m/sec is given, with half
that (0.08 m/sec) desirable.  We passed that along to the A/C guys doing
our lab renovation and they were happy they could achieve that even with
the heat loads of the microscopes we spec'd (most are 2-4 kW, with scanning
confocals or Ti:Sapphs being twice that).

To keep the air velocity that low they are installing cloth ducts and vent
covers like (exactly the same?) as these:

http://www.ductsox.com/

In the one small lab we have those installed already they are working very
well.

Rusty Nicovich


On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 8:18 PM, Peter March <[hidden email]>
wrote:

> *****
> To join, leave or search the confocal microscopy listserv, go to:
> http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=confocalmicroscopy
> Post images on http://www.imgur.com and include the link in your posting.
> *****
>
> Hi,
>
> We're going through a similar thing for our super resolution suite and my
> advice
> would be to tell the air-conditioning people the temperature you want the
> rooms to
> stay at and then make them do their job. It shouldn't be you telling them
> how to
> sort out an air conditioning issue. Surely they should know how to
> calculate that if
> they can measure the room volume and you've already given them the heat
> output
> of the microscopes. You wouldn't take a car to the garage and have to tell
> the
> mechanic how to fix your car.
>
> Most air conditioning units are a pain for the microscope companies as the
> air flow
> causes vibration on the microscope and can actually cause more problems
> than the
> room temperature. There is a very simple solution to that and I'd really
> push your
> company to install an air sock system. This is just like it sounds : the
> air blows
> along a long material pipe and blows out through the material so that
> there are no
> direct air flows in the room. Costs are about the same as a normal fin
> based
> system but work far better in a microscope suite. You should also make
> sure the
> system will run 24/7 and isn't linked in any way to the main building
> cooling/heating control times. Our building only runs 7.30am-6.30am
> Mon-Fri !! so
> not very useful for a microscope suite.
>
> Hope that helps,
>
> Peter
>
> --
> Dr Peter March
> Bioimaging Senior Experimental Officer
> Faculty of Life Sciences
> The University of Manchester
> The Michael Smith Building
> Oxford Road
> Manchester
> M13 9PT
>
> Office: 0161 27 51571
> Mobile (from a University phone): 77 51571
> Mobile (from outside the University): 07747 118447
>

--

*Philip R Nicovich*

*Research Fellow,  **ARC Centre of Excellence in Advanced Molecular Imaging*



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