commercial & retail

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MEDICAL OFFICE BUILDING

372 West Lancaster Avenue

AEC, Inc. is providing structural, mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering for this new three-story, 15,000 square foot medical office building, slated for completion in 2020. Designed by Blackney / Hayes Architects, the building will feature physician offices, reception and file rooms, patient waiting lounge, examination rooms, X-ray space, and physical therapy / gym on the third floor. 

The structural system is steel framed with concrete composite floor design. The exterior and will be clad in brick veneer with metal stud back-up. 

The MEP systems include a high-efficiency VRF HVAC system, as well as a DOAS (Dedicated Outdoor Air System) to provide ventilation. The building will be 100% backed up by an emergency generator. A high-efficiency central domestic water plant will feed the building. 

UNIVERSAL HEALTH SERVICES 

Corporate Office Building Addition 

AEC, Inc. provided full-service engineering for the new 60,000 square foot, three story office addition to Universal Health Services corporate headquarters located in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.  

The civil site included additional parking, relocation of major utilities, storm water management, landscaping, and land development requirements.  

The structural requirements included a steel frame supporting concrete decks and sloping bar joist roof, all resting on spread footing foundations.  

The mechanical design consisted of the expansion of the existing building central plant, supporting new air handlers controlled by VAVs and area thermostats. The electrical requirements supported the mechanical along with perimeter office lighting and general space, low partition interior layout. The addition included an existing large conference center with special HVAC and lighting requirements to accommodate 500 people. 

VETERANS ADMINISTRATION HEADQUARTERS 

Philadelphia, PA

This 450,000 square foot headquarters for the Veterans Administration is a state-of-the-art example of innovations in engineering design and control.  The $6 million facility features a four-story atrium lobby; large office area; a pre-school and kindergarten wing; a 1,000-seat dining room, executive dining and fully-staffed kitchen; a warehouse within the building, and a 50,000 square foot mainframe computer facility. 

The project – encompassing the office area, computer area, school, warehouse and dining facility – was designed as five different facilities within one building.  The engineering required a complex series of tie-ins and redundancies to ensure 24-hour, 7-day operation and security. The entire building was supplied with heating and air conditioning through 18 large custom air handling units.  The central mechanical system included a large mechanical room with an isolated control room within the space.  The mechanical room housed the central boiler, along with two large chillers and a swing chiller.  It also housed the entire chilled water and condenser water pumping systems.  Nine pumps produced a flow of condensed water from the mechanical room through a three cell cooling tower on the roof.  The swing chiller’s primary use was for the office space but, it could supply chilled water to the 50,000 square foot computer room, in the event of temperature fluctuation within that space. 

A large ice storage system located below grade makes slush at night, then pumps chilled water to the mechanical room during the day, producing up to 75% of the daily air conditioning load requirement. 

The mainframe computer facility prints all the Veterans Administration checks for distribution throughout the United States.  Since this system runs 24/7, the building is supplied with two completely isolated power sources from PECO Energy.  There is a redundant A and B side UPS system to power the 50,000 square foot mainframe computer facility, until the three large emergency generators could take over the emergency load.  The building has a zenith load shedding system, which automatically sheds load from the operating emergency generators, if failure occurs. 

The UPS System feeds the power distribution units (PDUs) inside the computer room which, in turn, feeds the power to the main frames and printers.  There is a moisture detection system under the raised floor, which feeds back to the central DDC monitoring system for the building.  In addition to the standard air conditioning, the computer room has 10 large Liebert units, which supply cold air to the perforated tile of the raised floor. 

The fire alarm system also ties into the building’s control package, and automatically sounds an alarm to any area of the building where a sprinkler has activated or if smoke is detected.  This starts the stair pressurization systems and shuts off each of the air handlers individually once a fire alarm zone is activated.  The central lobby and the atrium have smoke evacuation systems and house the fire command center for the entire building. 

The building security system is state-of-the-art.  Standard door frames had to be enlarged to accommodate the wiring for the many different types of card readers, thumbprint scanners and photo scanners used throughout the building. A robot mail system delivers mail to each department and is granted access to doorways through its own security camera system in the door frame.  The computer room is individually secured from the rest of the building and is the only area where the robot system cannot deliver mail.