Construction of the new tower required the closure and rerouting of a major city street and the rerouting of major utilities that serve the hospital complex. Numerous major utilities located on the north wall of the existing hospital required relocation — without interruption of service. A new central utility plant was required to provide heating, cooling, and power to the new tower. The plant had to be interconnected with existing plants and had to be expandable for future loads. New and upgraded systems had to be adaptable to phased construction; ongoing renovation of the old 250,000-square-foot building and occupation of the new tower needed to operate in parallel during the transition.
KFI developed a plan for the new central utility plant that involved demolishing a small office building to create a site that minimized the piping and electrical feeder lengths for the utilities serving the new tower. KFI leveraged redundant capacity from existing campus systems to bring about major savings in the procurement of very robust utility systems for the new tower. KFI engineered and integrated control and automation systems for the new CCT using open-source, PLC-based controls with an industrial-grade HMI. This project provided an opportunity to modernize the control systems for the entire campus, all of which had been integrated by KFI. KFI provided Revit-based building information modeling, integrated with the architectural model and those of the other design professionals, resulting in a thoroughly coordinated design.
On Saturday, November 6, 2021, CCHMC moved pediatric critical care operations into the new LEED Silver®-certified tower served by MEP and control systems that are robust, redundant, highly efficient, and adaptable to the ever-changing demands of medical technology and patient care.