Successful lab design requires multiple crucial choices By the editors of R&D Magazine Fourth of a six-part series of articles based on research revealing the current state of, and likely challenges for, laboratory design. Refer to Part 1 (July, page 1) for information on how data were collected. Series produced with sponsorship support by Labconco Inc., VWR, Kewaunee Scientific Corp., and Biofit Engineered Products. Material originally published in a different form in the May 2006 issue of R&D Magazine. As the technologies within the research lab environment increase in complexity and diversity, the number of specifications and design criteria that are included in the overall design are similarly increased. Biosafety labs are governed by the “bible” of the BMBL: the federal manual “Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories.” Electrical, plumbing, and structural design entails rigid specifications assigned by the prevailing building codes. Fume hoods, air conditioning, and other HVAC systems are strongly influenced by ASHRAE and other standards. The numerous ICT (information and communication technologies) now being implemented within research labs have numerous IEEE and other guidelines to ensure their proper operation. Left mostly out of the codes, rules, and standards are many aspects of overall lab planning, environmental control, lighting, materials and people flow, security, site integration, lab sizing and relationships, and aesthetics. These aspects are discretionary, and the wide variations in choices are part of what make a research lab different from a warehouse. Decisions regarding discretionary criteria can make or break an effort to deliver an effective, on-budget facility that supports an organization’s goals—or wins an R&D Laboratory of the Year award. Users’ top 10 priorities According to a collaborative survey of researchers, performed in 2003 by R&D Magazine, Laboratory Design newsletter, and Reed Business Information’s Building Design & Construction magazine, the top 10 factors that are most important for a laboratory facility are (in order of preference):   1) Quality of the scientific equipment.   2) Technical resources to do the work.   3) Safety.   4) Adequacy (size) of the lab space.   5) Ventilation/indoor air quality.   6) Security.   7) Flexibility.   8) Adaptability.   9) IT infrastructure.   10) Indoor lighting. The last three (of 23 ranked items) are the initial construction cost, aesthetic quality of the design, and public areas—items that are of value to lab designers and to many decisionmakers at client organizations, but of less obvious perceived importance to the researchers themselves. The rank of the top 10 items varies slightly according to whether you’re querying researchers or research managers, but the general overall top items remain the same for both groups. (For the entire report on the 2003 survey, see “What Do Researchers Really Want from Laboratories” in the October 2003 issue of Laboratory Design or the 2005 Laboratory Design Handbook, published in Nov. 2004.) Funding the Lab of the Future According to R&D Magazine’s reader survey, the vast majority (about 80%) of the funding to build or renovate new research labs comes from internal sources. About a quarter of respondents who predict changes in construction funding believe funding is likely to match pace with inflation. But equal numbers of respondents say funding will grow faster than inflation, slower than inflation, or actually decrease. Eighty percent of R&D reader survey respondents said in-house funding would be used for new construction, followed by donor and government sources. (Readers were allowed to choose all applicable options.) Click to enlarge. Construction costs have been increasing at about twice the inflation rate and are likely to stay at that level for at least the next several years, according to Stanley Stark, VP at HLW International, New York City. HLW and Accu-Cost create an annual Facility Cost Construction Index (most recently reported in the June and July 2006 issues of Laboratory Design). Shortages of materials like cement, drywall, copper, and oil-based products (carpeting, plastics) continue to drive up ft2 costs—these raw materials account for about 12% of the total project costs. Skilled labor shortages and a movement to higher-cost urban sites for research labs are also inflating overall costs. If construction costs and siting choices are pumping up prices, then funding ought to increase to build a Lab of the Future at the same overall size as is built today. However, survey participants are pessimistic regarding any substantial increases. Indeed, there has been some backlash from large R&D spending, especially, in the biopharma arena where there is some excess lab capacity as firms downsize their domestic R&D staffs. At the same time, many U.S. industrial organizations are establishing global R&D facilities to support their global marketing programs. They are also building global manufacturing plants, which usually require some level of local R&D support. These global expenditures put a strain on the capital and local R&D budgets of U.S. industrial firms, further limiting their ability to build new labs. R&D reader survey respondents are divided on the future of lab construction funding in the next 10 years. About half say they’re not sure what’s going to happen (left diagram). Of those who believe change is inevitable, opinions vary widely regarding whether those changes will mean more money, or less (right diagram). Click to enlarge. The academic R&D market still appears robust, as universities jump on the biotech and nanotech bandwagons to support their local communities’ attempts to attract high-tech industries. However, new lab construction in the government arena is depressed as budget issues force administrators to support the status quo (which still is better than the overall 10% budget reductions that have been forecast by FY2009). Some government research lab construction that supports specialized programs like Homeland Security and the National Nanotech Initiative is continuing, but those programs are minimal in the grand scheme. In reality, some physical capabilities that would normally have been designed and built in the U.S. are now being established in other countries to support the global research community. Research lab construction in Asia, Eastern Europe, and even isolated spots in third-world countries appears to be growing at a pace that’s faster than elsewhere. Trade surpluses are being applied to the very aggressive growth of new research capabilities—private, academic, and government-supported. These labs are also being supported with funding from U.S., European, and Japanese industrial firms. While the U.S. is still the largest R&D country in the world by a substantial margin, there is several times more capital funding going into Asian research facilities than in the U.S. Planning the lab Figuring out how to balance researcher demands, upper-level decisionmaker priorities, budget constraints, and existing rules and standards is a tough task, but one that’s critical to creating a lab of the future. According to another recent R&D Magazine reader/lab designer survey, the most frequently used project planning tools are:   1) User meetings (used frequently by 76% of the respondents).   2) Design reviews (71%).   3) Benchmarking (68%).   4) Laboratory tours (66%).   5) Mockups (58%).   6) Milestone meetings (53%).   7) Predesign charettes (53%).   8) User surveys (42%).   9) Interactive Websites (32%).  10) Supplier reviews (18%). Clearly, the most important criterion for creating a successful new lab is creating and maintaining a good line of communications between the clients and the designers. All of the other items are tied to these communications. When the designer understands the users’ needs, capabilities, and long-term goals, and the users understand the state-of-the-art technical and construction criteria and construction product availabilities, costs, and attributes, the likelihood of success is greatly enhanced. If communication is at the top of the list, knowledge is right behind. Benchmarking and lab tours are essential for comparing and understanding the capabilities of existing research labs and technologies. The scientific community remains relatively collegial, and many organizations are amenable to sharing benchmark information and allowing building tours. That said, the proprietary nature of some organizations’ processes and products can make viewing a comparable lab facility difficult or even impossible. Safety and contamination control are key issues: you’re unlikely to tour an up and running Class 10 cleanroom at Intel, nor are you likely to gain access to the BSL-4 facility of this year’s Lab of the Year Special Mention winner, Building 18 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. But in most cases, an alternative facility can be found, and pertinent information can be gleaned from public sources. (Of course, another critical way to get the big picture is to hire a team that’s already highly experienced in building the kind of lab you want to build.) Building mockups Mockups, though less common than meetings, remain essential to the lab design process. Construction details or entire lab modules can be mocked up with the actual casework, fume hoods, bench tops, furniture, flooring, and lighting systems. Clients can walk through the mockups and provide feedback to the project team. Layout variations can be built and compared, different suppliers’ products can be installed and evaluated, and installation costs computed and analyzed. McCarthy Building Cos. Inc., St. Louis, worked on the BSL-4 lab at the CDC’s Building 18 project in Atlanta. McCarthy’s concrete experts tested at least 10 different combinations of cement, aggregate, water, and additives for the BSL-4’s airtight, leak-proof structural box. “The perfect concrete recipe for a BSL-4 lab in Atlanta is not going to be the perfect mix in Boston or anywhere else,” says Bud Guest, senior VP of advanced technologies for McCarthy. Mockup facilities were built using the top three concrete performers. Then, over a six-month period, the concrete team tested the mockups further before selecting the one that offered the greatest strength, smoothest finish, and least shrinkage and cracking. Specifying ventilation and cooling systems, like this computer cluster installation at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, can require a computational fluid dynamics analysis of the overall head loads and a variety of cooling system alternatives. These analyses are also useful for planning future upgrades and their system requirements and specifications. Click to enlarge. Modeling and simulation Many high-profile architectural firms with research lab experience now have software-based modeling capabilities for creating “walk-through” simulations of proposed designs. The software continues to improve—with its basis in the military and movie industries—but it is still costly and time-consuming. Most of these models are obviously computer-generated with no actual intention of being photo-realistic. However, these systems are very good for helping clients visualize spatial relationships and other aspects of facility design, including installations involving large instruments, like NMRs and MRIs. Technical issues like vivarium ventilation or cooling for intensive computer systems can be efficiently modeled with CFD software. Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK—this year’s R&D Lab of the Year Special Mention winner—knew that they had to manage a very large amount of heat that would be generated from their proposed blade computing cluster: one of the largest life science computing facilities in Europe. The team used CFD software to model multiple alternatives for cooling. Variables such as the spacing required between each cluster rack, the power supply cabling, and the configuration of the overall data center were tweaked, with particular attention to whether cooling should be provided in a top-down or bottom-up configuration. The resultant model offered key information on air temperatures throughout the system, buildup of temperatures in the clusters, and flow rates required for successful operation. The results provided the most efficient type of cooling system (down-flow, water-to-air unit coolers), the aisle width between cluster racks, the appropriate routing of cabling (overhead), and the specific water temperatures required to cool loads up to 4 kW/m2. The designers also were able to create growth models that would handle up to five times the current heat load (20 kW/m2), and the cooling system that would be required. The Wellcome Trust models offer a useful example for other design teams creating high-density computer facilities. The IT staff at Wellcome has freely discussed recommendations for rack size, power cabling, room size, optical cabling, fire suppressants, and even refurbishment (see http://tinyurl.com/fbpmp). Future look Most lab criteria, specifications, and rules are based on systems that apply to current technologies. It’s speculative, and thus difficult, to create capabilities for something five, 10, or 20 years down the road. Staying up-to-date on basic research trends is an important task for designers since these can provide clues to possible future facility directions. The general lag time from the basic research stage to the development of an actual commercial product is 12 to 15 years. This time frame has not changed substantially in more than 25 years. That lag time provides more than enough time to create a research capability that can evaluate the technology. It also provides a glimpse, successful or not, of the overall research lab requirements that would be needed to nurture a new technology. One of the few remaining spots of big-ticket basic research in the U.S. is the national lab network maintained by the U.S. Dept. of Energy, NASA, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Dept. of Commerce), and the National Institutes of Health. Researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Ill., and the Univ. of Chicago, for example, have created “the office of the future” that contains large-screen, flat-panel displays. People can talk with remote co-workers in a virtual environment; images are life-size and real-time. They’re also envisioning 3-dimensional representations (bordering on holographic displays) that allow multi-personnel meetings to be held with a minimum of display hardware and software. It’s difficult to visualize any current industrial or academic research lab with existing infrastructure to accommodate these technologies (networking, optic cabling, computer facilities). Existing space layouts (room size, furniture) might also be hard-pressed to accommodate a widespread move to the “office of the future.” Organizations that were able to rapidly accommodate that type of change might have a key advantage. Researchers at ANL and the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) have also created tele-immersion display devices—updates of the CAVE systems created by ANL and UIC/EVL researchers in the early 1990s. The updated versions provide augmented reality with gesture and facial recognition capabilities. Similar work is underway at other sites, like Stanford and the Univ. of North Carolina. These developments provide additional arguments for big-picture thinking and maximum flexibility in planning the lab facility. Tele-immersion networking requirements Type Latency Bandwidth Reliable Multicast Secutiry Streaming DynQos Control < 30 msec 64 kb/sec Yes No High No Low Text <100 msec 64 kb/sec Yes No Medium No Low Audio <30 msec n x 128 kb/sec No Yes Medium Yes Medium Video <100 msec n x 5 Mb/dec No Yes Low Yes Medium Tracking <10 msec n x 128 kb/sec No Yes Low Yes Medium Database <100 msec > 1 GB/sec Yes Maybe Medium No High Simulation <30 msec > 1 GB/sec Mixed Maybe Medium Maybe High Haptic <10 msec >1 Mb/sec Mixed Maybe High Maybe High Rendering <30 .sec > 1 GB/sec No Maybe Low Maybe Medium Source: Argonne National Laboratory The Lab of the Future is likely to require extremely sophisticated infrastructure to support “tele-immersion” environments—an update of existing CAVE visualization technologies.