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There are now several recognised PPVC project success stories in Singapore, including the.

And when we talk about capitalism, we cannot ignore the name Adam Smith.The problem I have with the way we’ve taken Smith’s thoughts and works is that it is piecemeal and skewed – we’ve latched onto some of his insights without exploring them more widely.

He was one of the first theorists to develop the idea of the economy of scale.How making things bigger, growing operations tends toward greater economic efficiency.He was right, in some circumstances.

The problem is that such simple rules, although alluring, can be unhelpful or plain wrong in other circumstances..When lecturing my students, I discuss the dis-economy of scale.

How large processes need large peak demands of inputs, how many design factors are not linear so doubling the size of a process can mean 4x or 8x the energy, the time, or the effort.

For some processes, a colony of ants would be much more efficient than a brontosaurus..There can be many changes throughout the lab design period, particularly with client equipment, and this can result in lots of changes to the services.. Coordinating the services at high level can be difficult, so every effort should be made to reduce beam depths or use castellated beams if this is not possible..

The biggest and most recurring challenge, however, is usually due to new services needing penetrations or alternative routing due to changes to client laboratory equipment.Labs need a higher air change rate than offices or other building types, which means lots of ductwork to and from the lab.

This is exacerbated if there are fume cupboards, as the discharges go to the roof and discharge vertically.The discharge stacks for these fans can be quite high, so we may have to design roof supports for flues.. One unusual issue we encountered was a vibration requirement for an X-ray machine.