stihl company virginia beach
Stihl Various Projects
Founded in 1974, the Virginia Beach-based STIHL Inc. is one of several manufacturing facilities in the STIHL Group and is the headquarters for U.S. operations. Over the past five years V&G has been contracted for various projects related to their rapid company growth.
Location: Virginia Beach, VA
Owner: Stihl
Type: Design
Budget: Varies
Stihl Various Projects
Project Info Continued ….
In 2007, around the time of Stihl’s new Guidebar Plant opening, Vansant & Gusler started contracts with the Stihl Virginia Beach facility through design for an addition to their Raw Materials Warehouse #3. Their were concerns regarding the accumulation and ventilation of flammable gases in the Battery Charging Areas. A study was conducted to confirm the ventilation requirements could be met with existing systems once the new addition to the warehouse was completed. Once a professional relationship was established, Vansant & Gusler was fortunate to be awarded other contracts such as 2010’s Compressor Study analyzing existing conditions and providing recommendations for replacing 3-100 hp and 1-75 hp air compressors with 3-200 hp air compressors. The study was limited to electrical considerations and did not include analyses of any other systems.
Subsequent projects in 2011 included preparing electrical one-line drawings for them as well as design services for an addition of a plastics Extrusion Blow Molding area to the facility. Later in the year Stihl wanted to relocate their data center into a newly constructed 3,200 SF, 2 story building. V&G designed a 150kW indoor diesel genset, automatic transfer switch and interior electrical distribution system for the data center.
There were many considerations for the design since the STIHL SSC data center definition was based on the international “Telecommunications Infrastructure Standard for Data Centers”, TIA-942 which mean the SSC data center had to be capable of meeting the requirements of at least TIA-942s “ “Concurrently Maintainable: 99.982% Availability”.
The design criteria involved the building having its own fire compartment for the data center, smoke and fire sensors, rapid fire extinguishing system (e.g. like F200) not water or CO2-based, doors with access control system and a minimum fire proof class F30, emergency lighting and power, redundant power supply, protection grounding and lightning protection. Other important considerations involved a water alarm in the data center, appropriate flood prevention, redundant air-conditioning that was sized in failover mode, long-term cooling for all IT equipment including monitoring of air-conditioning, a fire shutter, a fume outlet, temperature sensors at different points of the datacenter and optimized airflow to prevent hot spots within the data center.
Later in 2014 V&G was contracted again for design services and support regarding the update of an existing welding line in their fairly new Guidebar Plant.
