Ten ASHRAE Grants Awarded To Universities

University of Oregon students, come on down. You’re the next contestants on the eco-roof game.
Under a teaching project funded through a grant from ASHRAE, students at Oregon will be challenged to develop, construct, and determine the R-value of a green roof through a hands on experience, known as the eco-roof game. The project was one of 10 grants funded by ASHRAE through its senior undergraduate project grant program.

The grants, totaling some $65,000, are awarded by ASHRAE to colleges and universities worldwide to promote the study and teaching of HVAC&R, encouraging undergraduate students to pursue related careers. The grants are used to design and construct projects.

As part of the eco-roof game, students will use actual building materials, a heat flux transducer, dataloggers, and moisture meters to learn about heat loss and gain, insulation value, material properties, water conservation, evapotranspiration, and to consider strategies for conserving energy.

“Targeting both architecture and engineering students about energy and the environment is particularly important because, whether aware of it or not, they play a central role in shaping the world in these areas,” said Alison Kwok, a professor at the university who submitted the grant application. “A thoughtless decision about building orientation may create a cooling load that lasts as much as a century. Instilling an experience about envelope materials can influence decisions about building design that will impact power use for thousands of business days.”

Other ASHRAE grant recipients are:

  • American University of Beirut: experimental investigation for performance and optimized design of radiant heating panels for rooms constructed according to Lebanese building thermal guidelines;
  • Cairo University: water cooling tower educational stand—design and fabrication;
  • Purdue University–Fort Wayne: design and development of solar cooling demonstration unit;
  • Mapua Institute of Technology: development of an indoor environment quality measurement laboratory and laboratory set up of thermal ice storage for air conditioning systems;
  • Purdue University–Calumet: cooling systems for data centers;
  • Texas A&M University: design and construction of solar powered refrigeration system using carbon nanotubes and methanol;
  • Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana: solar absorption refrigeration module for the chiller type HVAC lab;
  • Western Kentucky University: passive residential cooling system