Sony North American Headquarters

Sony North American Headquarters, Building 1
San Diego, CA

http://www.sundt.com/projects/sony-electronics-north-american-headquarters/

On this LEED-Gold job we provided (2) 8-fan cooling towers with the VFD and Tower Control Panel for each tower in a single enclosure. They originally planned to add a third cooling tower, but Sony has found that the load is fully covered by the two towers.

When they initially were looking at metal towers and had a 50% safety factor built in on the load requirements so that if a motor was down (meaning one whole tower was down), the other tower could still handle 75% of the load by itself. They realized right away that with Tower Tech and the (2) 8-fan cooling towers, if a motor went down you would just lose 6.25% of the total load, so there was no need to include a safety factor in the load requirements.

Another important issue was that the metal tower with the fans up top would have more than 10 times the drift than Tower Tech towers with the drift eliminators on the very top. This also blocks sunlight exposure to the condenser water cutting the chemical treatment costs by over 30%. These towers are located on the fourth level of a parking structure, so this guarded the nice cars from getting paint damage.

Mechanical Engineer : McParlane & Associates
Mechanical Contractor : Pacific Rim Mechanical
General Contractor : Sundt Construction