A team of UBC MECH students, Samarth Joshi, Sylvia Odaya, Zander Brosky, Aubrey McNeil, Kathy Yang and Tammy Yu, won first place in this year’s American Association of Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Design Calculations Competition, beating out 18 other teams from around the world.
The ASHRAE Design Calculations Competition is an international competition to prepare a complete Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system design for a complex building. Students are required to determine the heating and cooling loads of a building in a specific location–this year, Beijing China–and design the system used to heat, cool and ventilate the building. The submission package includes drawings, supporting calculations (by hand and with building modelling packages), and a report, all of which is evaluated by a panel of senior engineers for technical accuracy, innovation and presentation clarity.
The UBC team completed the design as a MECH 457 capstone project, supervised by MECH professor Dr. Nima Atabaki and Ali Nazari from the Integral Group, with Dr. Steven Rogak as the client. The team will receive their award at the ASHRAE 2017 Winter Conference in Las Vegas next January.