Central Park Pump Station - Illinois

Jul 19

Transportation | Building Infrastructure | Illinois

Project Summary

The purpose of this project is to convert a steam powered water pump station to be electrically driven. This project is part of a larger plan to upgrade all of the City‘s water pump stations. It was imperative that the Pump Station remain active during the entirety of the project and all of the existing systems and utilities stayed on-line. Careful planning and coordination between multiple contractors, the City of Chicago, and the operations personnel at the Pump Station ensured the success of the project and the continued operations of the facility.

Because the Pump Station stayed on-line throughout the construction process, the work was planned and completed in phases. Aldridge developed a 3D scan of the pump room and boiler room basement that was incorporated into our Navisworks model. We could then turn these scans on and off in the model as needed and discuss in what phase existing equipment, pipe, conduits, etc would be removed. This project had full coordination among the MEP trades using Navisworks Manage Clash Detection to find and resolve issues. Once an area was signed off by all trades as being clash free, we were then able to use the model for prefabrication opportunities.

The scope included the refurbishment of five pumps, the installation of five VFDs (variable-frequency drive), and the construction of a small unit substation. In addition, Aldridge installed fiberglass reinforced epoxy (FRE) ductbank in the old coal bunker of the facility. The FRE ductbank package was a 55-way consisting of 37 two inch and 18 four inch conduits.

The Aldridge team utilized information from the coordinated BIM model for accurate material lists, creating prefabrication details, and locating Trimble points for installation.

An important prefabrication concept on the project was the prefab of a large rack of (18) 4” conduits and (37) 2” conduits that ran more than 300’ from the underground through the light fill area to the boiler room basement. We were also able to use our CNC machine to create duct bank cards to hold the duct banks in place throughout installation.

The underground conduit racks that route up into electrical equipment was also prefabbed. Templates within the Revit software allowed the team to isolate the racks in the model, tag the conduit and support steel, and create schedules of itemized quantities. We are also able to assign Trimble points to each conduit that stubs up through the slab so that the installers knew exactly where the rack needs to be placed.