The student design competition’s guidelines provide enough background information to enable the 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 the given program.
The Integrated Sustainable Building Design (ISBD) competition’s aim is to encourage 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.
Teams may compete in one of the three categories:
- HVAC Design Calculations
- HVAC System Selection
- Integrated Sustainable Building Design (ISBD)
ASHRAE recommends that the project groups consist of at least two members from an undergraduate engineering or architecture curriculum for the HVAC Design Calculations or HVAC System Selection and at least three members (architecture or construction, mechanical & electrical) for the ISBD competition. Team members can be from multiple colleges. All team members must be enrolled during the semester/term in which they contribute to the design.
The 2019 student competition focuses on a new small hospital in Budapest, Hungary. The final HVAC System Selection and Design for the proposed building shall address the following major design goals:
- Low Life Cycle Cost
- Low Environmental Impact
- Comfort and Health
- Creative High Performance Green Design
- Synergy (with architecture)
