© Nicholas Calcott, courtesy of OXMAN.
If You Dream It, We Can Build It!
Over the past few decades, we’ve taken on ambitious projects that have expanded our capabilities to customize controlled environments. We helped develop LED lighting and a hydroponic nutrient system for chambers designed for space missions, created a chamber cooling system that uses circulated lake water and built chambers that open for a robot to enter and monitor plant growth. We even designed elegant climate “capsules” with glass doors and a modular interior that can transform to suit various experiments. All we need is your research vision, and we can make it a reality!
We Customize Chambers Like No One Else Can
If you envision a controlled environment that you can’t find in any catalog or on any website, Percival will work with you to bring your research dream to life. These distinct company qualities set us apart in our industry and give us an unsurpassed ability to customize environmental chambers and rooms:
Our Collaborative Nature – We’ve partnered with world-class lab planners and architects to create award-winning controlled environment solutions. Our team excels at listening, suggesting and reinventing until we reach the ideal design everyone involved can take pride in.
Our “Nothing-Is-Impossible” Mindset – We see obstacles as puzzles and love the adrenaline rush of solving them. This mindset drives our engineers. To them, anything is possible if it doesn’t break the laws of physics.
Our Passion for Science – We’re proud of our products, but we’re more impressed with how our clients use them to create better science and improve our world. Nothing is more satisfying than helping our clients achieve their research goals and advance scientific discovery.
Our State-of-the-Art Facility – We expanded our manufacturing floor to accommodate customized walk-in rooms and unique builds. We’ve also invested in cutting-edge technology for sheet metal design so we can fabricate our own parts.
Our Fast, Flexible Building Process – Our long history and extensive experience assembling climate-controlled chambers and rooms have taught us how to test and adapt our products as we build, streamlining our process to be faster and more flexible.
OXMAN’s Elaborate
Climate “Capsules”
The four environmental rooms Percival customized for OXMAN, a stunning 36,000-square-foot design and innovation lab in Manhattan, took our technical design skills to new heights. These elegant climate-controlled “capsules” feature stylish glass fronts, configurable lighting panels, modular walls for attachments and shelving, a mount for a removable robotic arm, an extended temperature range and software that can replicate climates from historical periods.
Percival custom-built these chambers from the ground up to support nearly any controlled environment experiment OXMAN can dream up, from testing compostable footwear to recreating the scents from an ancient Oak Tulip Tree forest. This collaboration between Percival and OXMAN produced the first-ever climate chambers that blend aesthetic beauty with precise technology and unmatched versatility.
Advanced Research Facilities
The Weill Hall Plant Growth Lab
Cornell University
Developers of Cornell University’s Weill Hall Life Sciences Technology Building were aiming for the exclusive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold Certification. They needed 22 customized growth chambers that utilized a proprietary lake source cooling system. Unable to find a chamber manufacturer to meet these unusual specifications, they turned to Percival Scientific. We collaborated with Cornell to develop a hybrid cooling system combining lake water and traditional refrigeration, ultimately helping the building secure the LEED Gold Certification.
The Enviratron Facility
Iowa State University
Percival partnered with researchers from the Plant Sciences Institute at Iowa State University to construct a research facility with chambers that a robotic rover could access for automated phenotyping of plants. Percival customized the chambers with an airlock system and sliding door at the back. We also opened the chamber system protocols to allow the researchers to develop their own application to control the growth chambers.