New Research Campus Wins Seal of Approval

By Elaine S. Silver
The author, a freelance writer, lives in the Hudson
River Valley of New York State and reports frequently
for Design•Build and other publications.

(Photo courtesy of FM Global)

Who says design-build is only for simple jobs like parking garages? Not Tom Lawson, FM Global’s senior vice president of research and approvals. The commercial and industrial property insurer is just completing work on one of the largest and most technologically advanced property-loss-prevention research and product testing centers in the world.

The $70-million FM Global Research Campus is mind-bogglingly complex and replaces and combines three facilities in three states. The 1,600-acre campus in rural West Glocester, R.I., will house the largest fire testing facility in the world, including a 20-Mw calorimeter, to be used by FM (Factory Mutual) Global, Johnston, R.I. and FM Approval, an independent third-party product testing and certification organization that bestows the "FM approved" product label. "The only way we could have built the center is with design-build," says Lawson.

The 33,000-sq-ft large-burn laboratory, part of a larger 108,000-sq-ft fire technology laboratory, has a 60-ft-high movable ceiling. Research staff can re-create all types of factory and product conditions in order to conduct fire tests. From the tests, scientists can determine how a product will burn in a warehouse, how much smoke and damaging fumes it will emit and how many sprinkler heads it will take to put it out.

A 12,000-sq-ft natural hazards laboratory gives Mother Nature a run for her money by replicating weather conditions such as heavy rain, hail and hurricane strength wind-blown debris in order to test building materials. This will be the only place in the world where hurricane conditions can be replicated inside a building. There’s also a laboratory for testing electrical equipment in hazardous locations and even a bunker to demonstrate the effects of dust explosions. "It’s 15 projects in one," says Robert Nicodemus, principal architect of Boston-based Bergmeyer Associates.

Proper Planning

The road to design-build was as studied and meticulous as any of FM Approval’s product tests. Nicodemus says that when FM Global asked his firm to provide a needs analysis of its testing facilities, he was blunt: "I said we didn’t know anything about the test facility. They said, ‘that’s why we need you, so we can explain it to the customer and designer and engineer.’"

Nicodemus

Nicodemus assembled a team to listen. The process engineer, R. W. Beck, Seattle, knows how to handle bad water and make it good again; systems engineer Vanderweil Engineers, Boston, understands fire; civil engineer Caputo and Wick Ltd, Rumford, R.I., can handle a campus that was going to triple in size and structural engineer Odeh Engineers Inc., Providence, can make unassuming warehouse-like buildings withstand the unique experiments that would take place inside. They listened for five months and when FM started asking questions about cost, Providence-based Dimeo Construction was brought in as a consultant.

"FM told us they wanted the facility finished in 24 months. Two or three of the performance systems in the buildings could take 24 months by themselves," says Nicodemus. "We recommended design-build so we would not have to educate someone new." By January 2001, the design-build team prepared a basis for design/criteria and preliminary documents for the site and buildings. And Bergmeyer handed off its lead role to Dimeo.

Steve Rutledge, Dimeo executive vice-president, says that the team work sessions were the key to developing the project’s requirements. It was a collaborative effort with the FM scientists and the design-build team. "We worked very closely to take the existing facilities functions and operations and apply them in an upgraded format to what we have today," he says. The information scope was awesome. "So much information in the scientists’ minds had to be downloaded to our engineers and designers," Rutledge says. "After reviewing what they did in the conversations in the work sessions, we would develop the requirements."

One key decision was choosing the electrostatic precipitator air emission control system. It is a long-lead item, taking two years to obtain. The device removes particulates from gasses by charging them with an electric field and then attracting them to oppositely charged collectors, an essential process in a fire testing facility that produces particle-leaden smoke. R.W. Beck and FM scientists created a performance specification, location plan and specification for electrical power. But it took some digging. The team realized that 70% of the operation requires only 50% of the air emission control volume. So, it made sense to order a dual system that could run at 50% and 100% capacity. It was also more efficient to use and if one unit needed to be repaired, the other could still operate.

"We ordered the [precipitator system] in the spring of 2001, even before we determined the guaranteed maximum price of the project in July 2001," says Nicodemus. A wet electrostatic system was chosen over dry because dry uses twice as much electricity and power is an issue at the rural site. Ed Ryan, FM’s project manager, notes when the system was shipped from the manufacturer in Oregon, it arrived at the project site on 26 18-wheeler trucks. When fully assembled, the stack tops out at 110 ft high.

Main Mission

Choosing the precipitator probably seemed like a walk in the park compared with the biggest challenge of the project–designing, documenting and finding a vendor for the building controls and data collection systems. Data collection is the raison d’etre of the testing center. That is how FM scientists know what happens during a fire and the aftermath. And it is the way in which scientists can compare products and their ability to withstand heat, cold, electricity and wind. "It’s the most exciting part of the job," says Rutledge. "A roof is a roof and a building structure is a building structure, but what happens inside is the heart and soul of the building." FM’s Lawson agrees. "At the end of the day, it isn’t about the building, it’s about the technology," he says.

(Photo courtesy of FM Global)

Nicodemus explains that the team put three dozen scientists in a room and had them explain how they collected data and why. The scientists described how much redundancy they needed. The challenge was to create a program to select the data control vendor. "It took nine months from the listening stage to finding the vendor. We knew this was our mission from the first day of the project," Nicodemus says. "The building management system has to be tied into the data acquisition system," says Lawson. "And no one understood the scope when we put in the specification, so this had to be design-build." Nicodemus says the team had to find data control specialists that could do two things simultaneously–make all of the operational systems of the building controlling vents, lighting and fans work automatically during a fire and gather all the information through the ducts. In other words, that giant 20- Mw calorimeter is useless without a system to evaluate the data emitted by the fire. "We had to educate each of the perspective vendors on how their systems could accomplish it," says Rutledge. "It was the major challenge of the project." The task was so complex that the non-disclosed company selected had to add more specialists to its staff.

Hot Stuff

What demonstrates the mettle of a design-build team is not just how it meets the known needs of a project, but how it deals with an unexpected crisis. This team was literally and figuratively fire tested to solve the biggest curve thrown at the project.

The ceiling tiles specified for the moveable ceiling in the large-burn testing unit turned out to be unfit for the job. The Armstrong Ceramaguard fire-proof tiles were adequate for the building’s overall temperature criteria of 350° but not for the moveable test ceiling, explains Dimeo’s senior project manager Frank Allard, "After going through the process, we learned that the movable ceilings temperature requirements should have been set at 2,000°." This discovery caused more than a little hair pulling, remembers Ryan. Since the moveable ceiling already was constructed, there would be weight and size restrictions on the products the team could consider.

The design-build team was structured with an "executive management approach," says Lawson. "Everyone tries to resolve the issues on their level." But if they couldn’t, they would then bring the issue to Lawson and Rutledge. Finding the right ceiling tiles, however, took the effort of many of the team members.

For two months, the team looked at several products on the market: board products, sheets of insulating material, ceramic products and aerospace products. They consulted with several product manufacturers, including those specializing in refractory products used in powerplants and big incinerators.

(Photo courtesy of FM Global)

Dimeo employed two structural engineers to check the design and the team used FM’s own facility to test an array of products. In the end, the team was able to creatively fashion heat-resistant ceiling tiles out of the castable refractory material. It looks and pours like concrete and the team created 10-ft by10-ft tiles out of the material. The tiles were thinned and then heat cured over a 10-hour period to remove the mechanical or hydrolytic weight, shaving 4 lb off of each tile in order to meet the test ceiling’s maximum weight criteria of 12 lb per sq ft.

"It was stressful but everyone remained positive and worked together to figure out the best options to go forward with," says Allard. "The whole project was a team approach so there was no sense of blame. We did not get into finger pointing, it became a matter of how do we get this done."

In another feat of flexibility and creativity, the design-build team had to come up with some innovative solutions when the Florida legislature changed its building code requirements to withstand 160 mph winds after the Natural Hazards Laboratory already was built to the 140 mph specifications in the old code. "We had to buy a bigger fan, which is easy, but all the building systems had to withstand the increased wind," says Lawson.

Allard says the team brainstormed on ways to retrofit the building without having to rebuild it. "We came up with additional reinforcing and more masonry on the roof deck," he adds.

Nicodemus says the reason design-build worked on this project was because everyone knew what their role was. "The whole objective was to deliver to FM Global a facility that would make them number one in the world of testing and that would last them 20 to 30 years." Rutledge agrees. "We worked with a true partnering approach where everyone is working collectively for the good of the job," he says. "No one had ever built anything like this," Lawson says. "What a great partnership."

The new testing center is on time and on schedule and due to open in September. When fully operational, it will perform over 500 concurrent tests annually and deliver research data to thousands of clients around the world. But there is no need to do much research on the project delivery system. As complex as this project is, the team members say it could not have been done without design-build.

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