Services

CONCENTRATION TESTS

Laboratory buildings with poorly designed ventilation systems can potentially be harmful to their occupants and to people in the neighboring areas. In classic cases, toxic plumes for a laboratory exhaust stack have found their way to fresh air intakes for the buildings, exposing occupants to high concentrations of harmful substances. In other cases, people on the grounds around a lab or in nearby buildings can be exposed. Sometimes the exposure only results in odors. Odors, in and of themselves, do not pose a serious health threat, but may reveal other problems and are frequently themselves undesirable. Odors in and around a laboratory environment may draw unwanted attention from the workers in the lab as well as people walking, working, or living nearby.

Overly conservative designs such as tall exhaust stacks, high volume flow velocity, additional air pollution control equipment will almost certainly guarantee prevent these issues. However, any of these solutions can involve considerable costs and/or aesthestic drawbacks. It then becomes very useful to be able to accurately predict the behavior of the plume from the laboratory exhaust stack. If the designer knows where the plume will go and what concentrations will occur for each set of design choices, he/she can select the most economical and aesthetically pleasing design that will ensure safety for the building's occupants and visitors. AAT's wind tunnel study provides this quantitative information about the plumes from each set of design choices.

PEDESTRIAN COMFORT EVALUATIONS

High winds can cause uncomfortable or unsafe conditions for pedestrians and occupants of outside venues such as balconies or seating areas. Such windy environments can be inadvertently created by seemingly innocuous design features -- funneling and accelerating ambient winds or bringing high winds from above the site down to the ground level. Often, reasonable design changes can effectively mitigate these potentially windy situations.

By measuring the winds around the scale model in AAT's wind tunnel, potentially windy situations can be discovered. Possible mitigating design changes can be tested to determine their effectiveness in reducing the problems.

INTAKE VULNERABILITY STUDIES

With the current concern about possible terrorist threats, it would be useful to know how a building intake could be sabotaged by terrorists or otherwise malicious intruders. Depending on the particular situation, a terrorist might be able to release a chemical or biological agent from outside the building and have the air currents carry it to the air intakes in high enough concentrations to harm the building occupants. This type of study uses the same scale model used for the dispersion or pedestrian comfort studies and quantifies the dispersion of such releases. We can, thus, help identify locations where increased security around the building may be advised.