ARI-R2: Renovation of the Physical Sciences Laboratory Building

Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green OH

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This proposal requests partial support for the renovation of the Physical Sciences Laboratory Building (PSLB) at Bowling Green State University of Ohio. This is the main research facility of the Department of Chemistry and Center for Photochemical Sciences at Bowling Green State University, and houses several research groups that have received external funding from several agencies. The research productivity of these groups has been affected by an inadequate and antiquated heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system in PSLB. This building now suffers from excessive temperature extremes and large thermal fluctuations, particularly in the summer. The building also has problems with vibration from the supply and exhaust fans, which are beyond their original service life. These problems result in a significant amount of instrument downtime and unsafe working conditions. Significant renovations will be made to the building's air handling systems in order to increase cooling capacity, improve filtration, provide new supply and exhaust air valves, retrofit existing fans to variable speed drive, and improved electronic controls. Other upgrades will include replacing the existing pneumatic controls on the heating and cooling plants, and the first phase of a fume hood replacement program that will replace 66 existing fume hoods with energy efficient variable volume fume hoods. The renovation is expected to improve the conditions for research on materials and devices for fast detection of explosives using luminescent microporous materials, programmable photophysics in metal-organic chromophores, low-power photoluminescence and photochemical upconversion, single-molecule protein dynamics and interfacial electron transfer dynamics, metal-peptide nanoassemblies, and real-time monitoring of photoinduced rearrangement and energy flow in small polyatomic molecules in solution. This renovation will also reduce energy consumption on campus, which will have indirect benefits for research and education.