40 hours of my past week...

Do any of you really know what I study or what type of things I do in school? Well, let me give you a little glimpse into my life. This semester is our final "Interdisciplinary Team Design Project" where we're split into teams with two structural, two mechanical, and two electrical engineers. Basically we go through the entire design of a building from start to finish. A few weeks ago we had to do an architectural design, then they gave us the real plans and I've been working on what is called the Schematic Design. In SD's you narrow down what types of systems you think you'd use, develop a heating and cooling load for your building, analyse cost, code compliance and noise concerns (at least that was the scope of this project). So I thought I'd share some of Joanna and I's progress.

The building we are working on is the new office building for a local Architecture and Engineering firm called DLR. It's actually located just a block from my dorms - I can see the site from my window! Anyway, the systems we're looking at are individual heat pumps being connected to either a boiler, chiller and water tower or a geothermal system that extracts and rejects heat into the ground. There's actually not enough space to do a full geothermal system so we'll have to do a hybrid that drills as many bores as will fit on the site and then makes up for it with an additional boiler and small fluid cooler (which is just a closed cooling tower).

So from there we had to lay out where our heat pumps would fall and zone our building. You split the building into zones by determining how much airflow is required by each. A program called Trace gives us a report that tells us how much cooling and heating is needed in the worst case scenario as well as how much air needs to flow through the building and how much of that needs to be outside air. This is a picture of the zones on the second floor:

We also had to coordinate with the structural system because they're using a system with cellular beams which are the giant beams with the holes cut out in the middle. I created this drawing in AutoCad to show how our systems will work together:

So yeah, we wrote a 12 page document describing our progress and we have a 10 minute group presentation and then a 10 minute individual presentation tomorrow. I can't wait for it to be over with!