ASHRAE Student Design Competition

What is “International” ASHRAE Student Design Competition?

ASHRAE sponsors this competition to encourage students to become involved in a profession that is crucial to insuring a sustainable future for our Earth

Students work to design energy-efficient HVAC systems and winners are recognized at the Annual ASHRAE Winter Meeting

Since the LTU MSArE program is an integrated BS/MS, the student design competition’s guidelines fit well within the framework of our studios

The competition provides enough background information to enable the student teams to design or select the HVAC system for the given building, or to design a sustainable building implementing an integrated building design process (the architectural and building design for sustainability, and its supporting mechanical and electrical systems) for a given program

The Integrated Sustainable Building Design (ISBD) competition, which the program has entered and placed as a winner, encourages students to extend their knowledge beyond the core mechanical systems. For the ISBD category, the final design level presented may be in a preliminary stage, as the competition’s basic intention is to challenge students’ imaginative thinking and creative engineering approach to the building and all of its systems.

ASHRAE recommends that the project teams consist of at least three members (architecture or construction, mechanical & electrical) for the ISBD competition.

With a thriving and large local ASHRAE Professional Chapter nearby, LTU team members are members of the LTU ASHRAE Student Branch and are mentored by local industry professionals and their studio faculty.

Benefits of the ASHRAE Student Design Competition

This student competition requires multidisciplinary teams to design an energy efficient sustainable project approaching a “Zero Energy” building with minimized energy demands for HVAC and all other technical systems that could be satisfied with locally available or building-installed renewable energy sources (RES).

Students will be asked to satisfy a national or local sustainability standard (LEED or the equivalent in their country), and then implement RES to approach “Zero Energy” limit.

These are the principles and standards the LTU MSArE program already embraces

The fundamental goal of this design competition category is to encourage students to obtain experience in the ISBD process, thereby providing students with “real-world” experience while still in university

The MSArE program pro ports that architects and engineers should work together from the very beginning of any project to determine building orientation, layout, materials, mechanical systems, and electrical systems that meet the client’s needs and work with the surrounding environment to minimize energy consumption and to optimize the building systems.

This competition provides the breadth, depth, and experiential learning experience, while placing students on the world stage of the largest professional society that authored the Energy Standard by which we design and build buildings worldwide.

ASHRAE sponsors these competitions to encourage students to become involved in a profession that is crucial to insuring a sustainable future for our Earth – the design of energy-efficient HVAC systems.