SUCF Commissioning Term

Wendel was retained by the State University Construction Fund (SUCF) to provide commissioning services for a six-story, 198,000 sf Health and Wellness facility. The facility will be used for Primary Care, Women’s Health clinics, Specialty Care and Urgent Care. The facility will include exam and treatment rooms, minor procedure rooms, triage and consultation rooms, as well as offices, storage, waiting spaces. Other specialty spaces included MRI/CT Radiology and lab spaces.

Commissioning services were performed to satisfy the requirements of SUCF Program Directive 15H-9, and LEEDTM (both Fundamental and Enhanced credits) and started during design and continued through construction and occupancy. In addition to commissioning, Wendel’s team provided Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) management services during construction and performed final IAQ testing.

Systems Commissioned included:
• Building envelope
• HVAC
• Domestic hot water heaters and circulation pumps
• Electrical
• Medical gas and process systems

The facility had some unique systems that were commissioned including chilled beams that provided both heating and cooling, dedicated outside air units (DOS) with both a sensible and latent energy recovery wheels, dedicated MRI cooling system chiller, Elevator and Stair pressurization system that is controlled automatically during a fire incident or manually utilizing the Firefighters Smoke Control Panel.

In addition to some of the unique systems mentioned above that were commissioned, the building was going through the industries lack of labor availability and product procurement issues period which pushed the completion of the facility several months beyond what was originally planned which resulted in compressing the final commissioning stages of the project. To assist with not delaying the completion of the facility any further, functional testing was performed as equipment/systems were started up and operational instead of waiting for all equipment/systems to be ready before functional testing was performed.

Additionally, weekly commissioning meetings were conducted to not only discuss the traditional subjects such as the commissioning process and schedule but to be used to assist the contractors in coordinating what needs to be completed, identifying “stumbling blocks” and helping to remove them and setting goals for completion.