A team of Cal Poly engineering students took first place in an international competition with their senior project, a design for a heating, refrigerating and air conditioning system for the Drake Well Museum in Titusville, Pa. The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) holds the annual Student Design Competition to challenge students to design a practical, cost-effective and sustainable system.
Team “Cool Kids Only,” as they nicknamed themselves, was awarded first place in system selection, a challenge tailored specifically to mechanical engineers.
The Cool Kids, comprised of mechanical engineering students Evan Oda, Kristin Porter, Navid Saiidnia, Jeffrey Wong, Cameron Young and Lynn Gualtieri, entered a proposal for a variable refrigerant volume (VRV) system.
The VRV system allows for efficient indoor environment control and saves both money and energy, engineering graduate Lynn Gualtieri said.
“We settled on that because as part of the design competition we wanted something new and up-and-coming,” Gualtieri said.
The first challenge the students faced was picking a design that would be both practical and sustainable, which they found in the VRV system.
This year, the museum challenge also required students to factor in humidity and the fragility of artifacts, mechanical engineering graduate Navid Saiidnia said.
“There were a lot of special considerations we had to take into account,” Saiidnia said. “They had rooms with exhibits where you had to maintain certain conditions or the exhibits could get damaged.”
The real-life museum’s location, Pennsylvania, was also troublesome, Saiidnia said, because of the climate.
“It’s colder; it’s humid,” Saiidnia said.
The Cool Kids Team was stumped at first by how to deal with weather that was so different from temperate California, Saiidnia said.
The team solved this problem by using various energy sources to control the museum’s temperature.
The Cool Kids used a ground source water loop in their design, passing water in the VRV system underground to use the Earth’s own energy to heat or cool the museum, mechanical engineering graduate Cameron Young said.
“The great thing about that is when you reject heat into the ground during the summer months, you can pull that heat out of the ground in the winter months,” Young said.
The team also used the heat energy of air leaving the building to warm the air being brought into the building.
“Air leaving, for example, the bathroom, you can’t reuse because it has particles and contaminants,” Young said. “But we use the energy from that air and transfer it over to the incoming air.”
In addition to being versatile, the VRV system was also extremely efficient and green, which are major requirements of the ASHRAE competition.
To make the proposal even greener, the team also made use of solar panels to supply the energy that couldn’t be pulled from the Earth or air. The result was an environmentally conscious museum, Saiidnia said.
“We managed to make an almost zero energy building,” Saiidnia said.
The green appeal of the VRV system was not the only factor in taking the Cool Kids to victory, though, faculty adviser for the team Jesse Maddren said. The Cool Kids also put thought into its presentation.
The team members said they knew from the beginning they did not want to present their project in a typical fashion. Most engineering presentations are full of technical information and blocks of direct text, Maddren said, but the Cal Poly team decided to make their presentation more colorful.
“As engineers, we’re kind of to the point and don’t like the flowery,” Maddren said.
The team rejected the typical engineering report format, Maddren said, and drew inspiration instead from architecture reports. The resulting team report was larger than the traditional engineering report, and used graphics to communicate the key points of the proposal.
“As always, the engineering work was pretty solid,” Maddren said, but the information was presented in a more attention-grabbing fashion.
In the end, The Cool Kids said the most important thing the team learned from the competition was not just an engineering lesson; the team said it learned how to work effectively in a group.
“You have to try to make everyone happy, which is the biggest part,” Saiidnia said.