BACKGROUND
The PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend in Springfield Oregon is one of the largest hospital complexes in the State of Oregon. Providing over 350 licensed beds, it admits over 23,000 patients yearly and its staff actively provide more than 15,000 inpatient and outpatient surgeries annually in most medical specialty areas.

Commissioned in 2008, PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend is built on 160 acres and is comprised more than 1.3 Million square feet. The hospital includes 1,000,000 square foot acute care tower, 150,000 square foot Oregon Heart & Vascular Institute, 120,000 square foot medical office facility and a 30,000 square foot central plant facility.

Considered a wellness destination, Sacred Heart at RiverBend represents a state of the art approach to health care application and facility providing new levels of societal benefit to the surrounding Community. The key in Sacred Heart’s philosophy is to function with minimal adverse environment impact. Built close to a cherished river system, Sacred Heart was challenged to operate using no chemical-based water treatment for its cooling water operations.

As a result, the facilities team employed non-chemical treatment systems and planned aggressive monitoring of chiller performance to ensure the chilled water plant operated reliably and efficiently under the no-chemical regimen.

THE CHALLENGE
Once commissioned, management soon discovered rapidly developing fouling in the condenser loops as a result of various forms of fouling. The issue of degraded chiller performance due to fouling showed its itself most notably in rapidly rising chiller approach temperatures.

Specifically, the approach temperatures would climb in the PeaceHealth chillers within a few short weeks after manual cleaning and would rise as high as 17 degrees thus mandating another unscheduled manual cleaning event.

To make matters worse, the non-chemical treatment system seemed unable to stop the rapid growth of bacterial colony forming units that showed up constantly in cooling tower water tests. This led to the frequent application of shock treatment to manage the persistent bio presence in the cooling water.

THE SOLUTION
Pat Lamb, the Central Utility Plant Lead, knew the chiller related fouling was a serious cost generating problem and that a solution had to be discovered. Pat researched alternative chemical applications, competing approaches to non-chemical treatment and Automated Tube Cleaning Systems (ATCS) from brushes to ball cleaning systems. After thorough study, Pat chose the sponge ball ATCS as the best solution to provide control of the significant fouling problems in his chilled water system.