The commissioning staff works to reduce energy use and maintenance costs by ensuring campus facilities and equipment perform efficiently as per the intended design and purpose. The staff connects the skills and duties of the Physical Plant's Maintenance and Engineering and Architectural Services departments by focusing on three types of commissioning activities:

• New construction commissioning
• Existing facility commissioning
• Vibration analysis

New construction commissioning focuses on planning, design, construction, building systems testing and follow-up procedures for newly constructed buildings. It involves testing and verification of all major mechanical and electrical systems in a building to assure they operate as intended and meet the needs of building occupants.

Existing facility commissioning evaluates existing building and mechanical systems to determine whether they are performing as required to meet the requirements for the current intended use of the facility. This role is divided into two main areas:

• Retro-commissioning entails carrying out the commissioning process on an existing facility that was not originally subject to a commissioning program.
• Re-commissioning is the re-visitation of commissioning principles at a given time after a commissioning process was previously carried out (either at new construction or as a retro-commissioning effort).

Existing facility commissioning focuses on fine-tuning existing building systems so that only the optimum amount of energy is used to meet the present needs of the facility. This consists of a comprehensive survey of all system fluid capacities, an evaluation of control strategies, inspections of the current mechanical installation and an assessment of present maintenance strategies. Those efforts result in a "snap-shot" of the facility operation, allowing the commissioning team to baseline system performance. Less-intrusive fixes are then carried out, which may include, but are not limited to, controller calibrations and testing/adjusting/balancing of system fluid flows. The final steps include a recommendation of any programming changes, control component/system upgrades and proposal for mechanical system alterations required as to promote energy-saving opportunities and optimum building performance. In carrying out this work it allows for a more clear determination as to whether further HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) engineering studies are required to develop recommendations for facility upgrades.

Vibration analysis evaluates how efficiently mechanical equipment is operating in buildings. Using a vibration analyzer, all critical rotating equipment, including blowers, chillers, cooling towers, compressor units, pumps, fans and electric motors are measured for two main functions:

• New system acceptance testing means testing new equipment to verify that it meets MSU Standards for Construction and manufacturer's specifications upon installation.
• The development of a predictive maintenance program means routinely testing all critical rotating equipment in attempt to forecast system failures. Once fully implemented, the goal is to use the routinely gathered data to schedule system maintenance outages. This type of forecasting allows for more efficient operation and routinely scheduled maintenance and limits catastrophic failures of critical systems. The end goal is to not compromise building systems, which provide comfort and critical research support, and to optimize maintenance manpower.

Contacts

Jason Vallance, Engineer III/Supervisor, vallance@pplant.msu.edu