ASHRAE DESIGN COMPETITION 2021

ASHRAE sponsors these competitions to encourage students to become involved in a profession that is crucial to ensuring a sustainable future for our Earth – the design of energy-efficient HVAC systems. ASHRAE will recognize the outstanding student design projects at the 2022 ASHRAE Winter Meeting scheduled for January in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America.

The student design competition 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 and 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.

Participating teams are NOT required to have an ASHRAE Student Branch at their university.

COMPETITION DESCRIPTIONS

TThe 2021 student competition focuses on a new building on a higher education campus in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. 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)

May 4, 2021

Entries must be submitted electronically by this date by uploading the entry to the ASHRAE Society FTP site established for this purpose. Only teams who register will get the FTP site information emailed to them, so please register at least 30 days prior to this date to allow for processing.