Page 94 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong
P. 94

 Our customers are selling security and reliability to their customers. And we are their backup.
– Jeff Goggin, chief operating officer, Peterson-Cat
 DEFENSE INDUSTRY: RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
The San Francisco Bay Area has a defense industry that everybody knows about but few have actually seen. Peterson’s TC equipment often goes out to such jobsites, which are hidden behind layers of security and red tape. “A lot of the stuff we do is very tight-lipped,” says Young. “Our job is to get in there, do our thing, and get out. No questions asked.” In 2015, Peterson installed a low-tempera- ture chiller for AMPAC Fine Chemicals, located at the Aerojet site in Rancho Cordova. The system was designed to deliver a negative 40oF brine solu- tion for their manufacturing process. “I don’t know exactly what they do there,” says Young. “Some- thing to do with chemicals and explosives. All I know is that when I drive through the front gate, there are guards with guns.”
HEAVY CONSTRUCTION: L.A. HARBOR TUNNEL
In early 2000, the Los Angeles Port Authority let a bid to bore a ten-mile horizontal tunnel beneath the L.A. harbor for utilities. Seattle-based RKK Soil Freeze bored a 150-foot deep vertical shaft at each end of the proposed tunnel for access during tunnel construction. Instead of using conventional shafts shored up by rebar and concrete, they chose to freeze the ground, creating thick permafrost walls that needed no further stabilization. The 14- foot diameter shafts were used to convey the large drilling equipment down to bore the tunnel.
Matt George designed the chiller system to keep the ground frozen solid during construction. “They came up with the concept to drive into the ground 150-foot long, 4-inch diameter pipes, which looked like long pieces of picket fence. Each of those was like a capped wellhead—a pipe within a pipe—where they’d pump calcium chloride down into the center pipe at negative 20oF. The closed- loop system would absorb the energy [heat] and bring that back to the surface. Eventually, they cre- ated an eight-foot-thick wall of permafrost as solid as concrete.”
From there, the contractor dug out the center, leaving a hard-as-rock shaft that required no fur- ther shoring. Then they could bore the actual tun- nel underneath the harbor. After twenty months of construction, they shut down the chilling system, pulled up all the equipment and piping, then back- filled the holes. “It was a pretty clever method but relatively expensive, so they had to be very specific where they used it,” says George. “But it was a very fun project to be on.”
TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY: DOT-COMS
The growth of the Silicon Valley has had a tre- mendous impact on Peterson Power Systems as a whole, and its TC group in particular. Dot-coms and data centers generate huge amounts of heat that need to be managed and mitigated. “Heat is a natural byproduct of computers. Every data center needs cooling and maximum ventilation to keep its computers and hard drives running,” says Schalk. “Without the proper ventilation, all that equipment will overheat and shut down.” When the dot-com boom first hit in the early 1990s, a lot of the buildings going up were pre-fab tilt-ups. Vast amounts of money were waiting to be made so they built quickly, using huge cranes to put up four walls and a roof, often in one day. Some of those dot-coms were ready to move in and get started before they had the HVAC systems set up.
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