The lobby under the impressive atrium of
the US Patent and Trademark Office Consolidated Headquarters Complex.The
new US Patent & Trademark Office Consolidated Headquarters Complex
in Alexandria, Virginia comprises 2.5 million gross square feet
of office and support space. It will accommodate up to 7,500 employees
and includes two parking structures holding 3500 cars. The campus
is leased by the General Services Administration from LCOR Alexandria,
LLC. This represents the largest lease of private space by the GSA
to date.
More than 500 patents are issued each day. The heartbeat of this
workload is the 70,000 square foot Data Center located in the southernmost
building. To support its mission, the critical nature of the Data
Center extends to each of the other buildings. The reliability
of the engineering systems is paramount to the continued and effective
operation of the USPTO.
Building Systems
Each of the buildings has mission critical cooling loads and comfort
cooling loads. Redundancy in cooling equipment provides a reliability
desired for uninterrupted operation, ie: uptime. Since the campus
is comprised of many buildings and since each must operate as stand-alone,
locating redundant equipment in each building’s cooling plant
was not economically justified. The innovative solution to the
redundant cooling was to provide a campus cooling water loop that
connected all of the building plants together. Controls systems
were designed to allow optimization of chiller plant loading efficiencies
as well as loading the critical cooling systems to be interconnected
to and backed-up by the comfort cooling systems via the campus
loop installation.  Data Center
Redundancy and reliability of the power supply is also a mission
critical goal. The solution was to provide a primary electrical
service distribution, on site, owned and controlled by the Owner.
This primary service is supplied from two separate Dominion Power
System feeders at 13.8 KV. The critical mission of the Data Center,
Main Distribution Frame rooms and the distributed Communication/LAN
rooms throughout the buildings required Uninterrupted Power Sources.
The Data Center is supported by independent rotary UPS systems
and each of the remaining buildings is provided with single module
solid-state UPS systems to support IT services. The site is provided
with a Power Monitoring and Control System (PMCS) which supervises
the status of all key, critical electrical and mechanical equipment.
The new complex with a soaring atrium connecting its two main
buildings will provide a recognizable symbol of the USPTO and instill
pride in the employees who work there.
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