A6 – HVAC Selection – Grader’s Comments

• Everyone had good summaries on the relevant systems.
• It appears that most students believe that VAV is the "magic" system type and is good for almost every type of building. This results its constant winning in some team's matrices, which could be easily rejected under certain trivial scenarios (i.e. single-zone small building). To avoid such situation, a good approach is to try multiple cases and raise design scenarios to see if the result indeed makes sense. (2 points off for problematic logics)
• Only few teams commented on the eQUEST results. Students should at least explain or identify some of the numbers from the nice output files using your engineering judgment, not just putting them there for the sake of presentation. (3 points off for not explaining or identifying the eQUEST results.)

Shanghai Expo Pavilions

To continue the theme of the second assignment take a look through these buildings at the current World Exposition in Shanghai. Courtesy of Popular Science.

• How would you make them stand up?
• How would you heat and cool them?

There’s still lots of challenge in the building world!

Jim Mitchell

A5 – HVAC Variety – Grader Comments

• 
  Students have done a very good job in the numeric parameter part. All teams were able to find an extensive range of parameters for their systems.
  
• 
  The system descriptions show that students have difficulties understanding how each piece of the equipments in the systems work together. A good way to understand them is to look at the circulating path of working fluid (medium such as air, water or refrigerant that delivers heating and cooling). For this purpose, I have created a summary table for the major systems presented in class. Hopefully this will be helpful to students in developing the decision matrix for the next assignment.