Durrant, Alfalight earn ES Team Award

Engineered Systems, Dec, 2001 by Joanna R. Turpin

Weekly meetings, a project-wide lack of ego, a creative consulting firm, and an owner's rep who designed and installed some of the piping himself ... these elements make for an admirable performance on a tough project. They also add up to an Engineering Team Award.

Here's a riddle for you: What happens when a high-tech company needs a Class 1,000 cleanroom built on a small budget and designed, constructed, and brought on-line in 14 weeks? Is your answer complete chaos? That might be the case in many instances, but that's definitely not what happened for this year's recipients of Engineered Systems' Engineering Team Award.

The Team Award is given out each year to a group, including engineering/construction professionals and a facility owner, that best demonstrates how it can work together harmoniously in order to bring a project to fruition. This year, Engineered Systems felt that team spirit was best exemplified by those who designed and built the Alfalight Cleanroom Facility in Madison, WI.

This group of hard-working individuals had limited experience designing cleanrooms, but their dedication to getting the job done - and done correctly - helped them overcome any obstacles that blocked their path. The result is a cleanroom that was not only finished on time, it came in at half a million dollars under budget. And better still, almost a year after the project was finished, the cleanroom is working just great, and all team members have nothing but wonderful things to say about one another.

HOW THE TEAM CAME ABOUT

Alfalight is a high power diode laser manufacturer that is currently developing 980nm pumps for erbium-doped fiber amplifiers. The company was established in November 1998 to commercialize high power diode laser technologies that were developed at the Reed Center of Photonics, an engineering research center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. These patented technologies are based upon the use of aluminum free active-region (ALFA) diode lasers and novel structures incorporating buried gratings and ridges.

In early 2000, Alfalight decided the time was right to build a 10,000-sq-ft Class 1,000 cleanroom to manufacture its high power laser diodes. The company was already working with a design firm when Craig Cheney came on board. Now the director of processing for Alfalight, Cheney started asking some hard questions of the design firm, but he could never get a straight answer.

"Every time they came back with an answer it was either going to cost us another half million dollars or another million dollars," says Cheney. This design firm eventually gave them a final price tag of $4.5 to $5 million, which did not fit with the company's view of what a cleanroom should cost. The original design firm was dismissed in the last week of August 2000, and given that Alfalight wanted the cleanroom up and running by the last week of December 2000, Cheney had to find another design firm quickly.

Cheney turned to Carl Ruedebusch, president, Ruedebusch Development and Construction, Inc. (Madison), who knew of a building shell with a dirt floor that just might work for Alfalight. The company felt the shell would be perfect for its cleanroom and office space, and it decided to lease the space. Ruedebusch then helped assemble the team that designed and built the facility.

"Within a matter of a day-and-a-half, we assembled a whole new design and construction crew," says Cheney. Ruedebusch suggested that Durrant Group, Inc. (Madison) perform the mechanical and electrical design for the facility. (Durrant is a multidisciplined, multioffice, market-driven, client-focused, project delivery A/E firm whose motto is "Transcend the mundane by expanding the possible.") Durrant, in turn, suggested General Heating and Air Conditioning (Madison) as the mechanical contractor to do the material procurement and installation.

The team sat down in September and during four days of the initial design phase, Alfa-light and Ruedebusch came up with a budget for the cleanroom of around $2.2 million. Then the project really started to take off.

INTENSE DESIGN WORK

With only 14 weeks left to deliver a working cleanroom, the team knuckled under and began hammering out a design. Alfalight had a strict set of parameters that it needed for its cleanroom. Those parameters included 0.5-micron particles/cubic foot of air; a constant temperature of 70[degrees]F [ or -] 1[degrees]; relative humidity at 45% [ or -] 5%; and static pressure at .04 in. [ or -] .01 in. of water.

Alfalight was very sensitive to first cost, but it also looked at building operation costs and ease of maintenance. To that end, the team spent 15-hour days to come up with a preliminary design. "We actually weren't completely done with the design phase when we started construction. We had a really good base level plan, but details were worked out on a day-by-day basis as we started construction," says Cheney. Even so, there were no changeorders required throughout the facility's design and construction.