Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative (BRIC)

Shah Smith & Associates, Inc. provided the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing engineering design for the conversion of a 300,000 SF tire plant into public/private/partnership facilities that houses dry engineering laboratories, wet biology and medical laboratories, offices, computer labs, miscellaneous support, and instructional space.

The project was intended to be constructed in phases. The first phase was shell and core, with additional finish out phases scheduled for the near future.

As part of the project, SSA designed a high efficiency central utility plant that was scalable, efficient, and capable of being combined with satellite equipment to create a campus wide central utility plant.

The chilled water system featured dual temperature chilled water distribution to allow chilled water to be distributed at medium temperature for lab, chilled beam loads, and low temperature for standard air unit loads.  The plant is designed to allow any chiller to work on either loop.  Medium temperature chilled water can be generated using 30 percent less energy than standard low temperature chilled water.

In addition, the plant used a plate and frame heat exchanger to allow redundancy and capacity to be shared between the medium temperature and low temperature loops.

Chillers were variable speed drive connected to a high efficiency variable primary only distribution system, and designed to use passive condensate recapture as the primary source of condenser water makeup.