Student Design Project and Competition:

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. ASHRAE will recognize the outstanding student design projects at the annual ASHRAE Winter Meeting. 

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.

The Applied Engineer Challenge's aim is to encourage student creativity and innovation on an applied engineering concept. This hand's on competition is best suited for students that want to invent or optimize equipment technologies in order to solve market or societal problems. This design competition challenges the participants not only on the technical side, but also on conception and communication of details in order to share this technology with developing economies as well as the non-engineering community.

Teams may compete in one of the four categories:

• HVAC Design Calculations
• HVAC System Selection
• Integrated Sustainable Building Design (ISBD)
• The Applied Engineering Challenge

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 Applied Engineering Challenge is for a team of 1 to 6 engineering students with a keen interest in sustainable design of equipment.