Chilled Water

Wells Concrete’s new Brighton facility consolidates two existing Denver locations into a single, comprehensive manufacturing operation to enhance production capability and flexibility for the Denver market. The 122,673-square-foot precast facility sits on 64.5 acres and features year-round indoor production capabilities for architectural precast and outdoor structural forms, with lifting capacity upgraded from 15-ton to 25-ton cranes to accommodate larger products and higher volumes.

The manufacturing facility incorporates long-line prestressing forms and an expanded inventory of movable forms to meet diverse project demands. The versatile production facility enables identical product manufacturing with consistent quality while maintaining flexibility to meet demanding schedules and minimize project risk. The specialized facility includes a 4,500-square-foot mold shop, steel shop, lunchroom, office, maintenance bays, boiler and air-compressor room, production area, beam bed/storage area, tool room, QC lab, chemical storage area, and washroom.

As the project’s mechanical and electrical engineer, RMH provided mechanical and electrical design and construction-phase services for the new concrete pre-stress plant. Services included chilled water, steam, compressed air, power, and natural gas systems to support the specialized manufacturing operations.

BYU-Idaho is Idaho’s largest private University, sitting on a 430-acre campus with a district heating loop providing space heating for 40 buildings. RMH served as mechanical, electrical, and controls engineer for this project to add cogeneration capabilities to the Rexburg campus heating plant. The University replaced its coal-fired boiler plant with a new, multi-leveled heating plant containing a combined heat and power (CHP) system using natural gas. The project began with a conceptual study/economic analysis, which investigated the economic viability of adding cogeneration capabilities.

After completing the conceptual study and economic analysis, RMH designed the installation of a nominal 5.7MWe natural gas turbine with a 50,000 pph HRSG, which has a calculated simple payback of eight years. RMH’s design for the gas turbine featured a fully enclosed evaporative cooling system to increase the turbine output, as well as a turbine enclosure heat reuse system.