Designing a Sustainable Future: UC Team Places Third in International Building Design Competition

To ensure a sustainable future for our planet, architects and engineers must invest in sustainable design processes and energy-efficient systems. The Integrated Sustainable Building Design competition, an international design competition sponsored by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), challenges students to employ current best practices in a building-design simulation.

Five University of Cincinnati (UC) students recently competed in this international competition, placing third in the HVAC Design Calculations project.

The competition was an opportunity offered to students in UC’s advanced mechanical systems class, a technical elective course for upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students in the architectural engineering program.

“We thought this class was a good opportunity to further our understanding of mechanical systems,” says Joe Frees, recent graduate of the architectural engineering program and member of the UC team. “We directly applied skills to a real-world project. I had a lot of experience with single units from coursework and industry experience, but not with large mechanical systems.”

The competition focused on a simulated four-story building complex near Istanbul, Turkey. Students had to propose an energy-efficient design for this 70,000-square-feet facility that addressed the following design goals:

    •    Low Life Cycle Cost

    •    Low Environmental Impact

    •    Comfort and Health

    •    Creative High Performance Green Design

    •    Synergy (with architecture)

Teams competing in the HVAC Design Calculations category had to determine heating and cooling loads and design the selected HVAC systems for the building, all while demonstrating compliance with ASHRAE standards.

Whereas many teams spent the entire academic year on the competition, UC’s team had only months. “It was a pretty quick turnaround,” says Frees.

Architectural engineering associate professor Nabil Nassif, PhD, taught the advanced mechanical systems class and served as the design team’s mentor. He divided the class into two parts, spending the first half of the class teaching and covering all the steps of the design process and the second half advising the actual design project. He attributes the team’s success to its organization and strategic execution. “We had a very concrete plan and split our plan into tasks that we could complete in a certain time,” says Nassif.

To get started, the team learned a lot about the mechanical systems involved in a project of this magnitude. They learned to design and implement various systems and divided the complex project into tasks like load calculation, ventilation load calculation, system sizing, systems selection, scheduling and energy analysis.

One of the biggest challenges with the competition, says Frees, was the depth of the project. Frees and the team broke down these intricate systems into more manageable layers, measuring the building loads to determine baseline efficiencies and doing most of the math by hand.

“In the industry, we have the advantages of using programs that run a lot of our calculations,” he says. “For this project, we had to do a lot of those calculations from scratch.”

With the goal of reducing energy consumption, the team focused on was on high-efficiency units that used fewer resources, like gas and electricity. The team also benefited not only from the mentorship of Nassif but also from the guidance of industry partners. Many of the students were also LEED certified, having concrete knowledge in water reduction and energy efficiency.

Nassif plans to continue offering the advanced mechanical systems class next year. Amd continue to mentor the ASHRAE team. Rather than exclusively integrate the competition into one class, however, he hopes to offer the ASHRAE competition as a senior design capstone project to other upper-level architectural engineering students.

UC’s recent performance at the ASHRAE design competition may be the start of a long, prosperous future on the international scale.

The UC ASHRAE Integrated Sustainable Building Design team consisted of the following members: Joe Frees, Lauren Beckett, Chelsea Leonardi, Amanda Schmitt and Emma Wilhelmus. In January, the UC team will be recognized for their outstanding work at the ASHRAE Winter Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.