This spring, students in a new construction engineering course got to experience what it was like to be part of a multidisciplinary design team. The two students taking Building Energy Modeling (ConE 454X) worked in collaboration with an architecture studio class, serving as engineering consultants for a green and sustainability buildings course.
Brad Perkins, senior lecturer in civil, construction, and environmental engineering, partnered with Kevin Nordmeyer, architecture lecturer and Perkins’ longtime colleague in industry, to offer this unique opportunity.
Challenged to design a building proposal for a new conference center at the University of Iowa, the architecture class was split into four teams of about five in each group. Design requirements integrated several green construction principles, so the groups needed help assessing a building’s energy efficiency.
“The construction engineering students analyzed how much energy the building models would consume over the course of a year, compared alternatives, and came up with the lowest energy consuming building available,” explains Perkins.
The analyses they offered encompassed lessons from ConE 454X as well as from the prerequisite class ConE 354X, where the students studied energy codes and how they apply to buildings and mechanical systems, as well as the trade-offs associated with finding the most energy efficient solution as set forth by established energy codes.
The 400-level course teaches the students how to apply that knowledge using software called TRACE 700, a system that uses algorithms recommended by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) to assess the energy and economic impact of buildings. The software addresses building components such as architectural features, comfort-system design, HVAC equipment selections, operating schedules, and financial options.
Using this software the students have been able to apply energy codes to several building projects including analyzing a previous built building at Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC).
“Doing our own economic analysis is part of the overall assessment as well because if you don’t understand how to apply the energy codes economically, the energy analysis we get from TRACE 700 is just a bunch of numbers on sheet of paper,” explains Matt Roth, senior in construction engineering and 454X student. “You need to take those results a step further and apply them economically to understand what the best choice is.”
Roth’s 454X peer, Eric Olinger, also a senior in construction engineering, adds, “This class has taught us how to interpret this information because even though learning to use TRACE 700 and applying the code to generate an output file with all the results on it is fairly easy, you need to actually understand how to apply those results.”
Both classes were new to the course catalog in the 2011-2012 school year thanks to the efforts of Tom Brumm, associate professor in agricultural and biosystems engineering, and many others.
“Tom is a big supporter of courses like this that give students practical application of what they are learning, so he played a huge part in securing the funding for the course,” explains Perkins.
While the novelty of the courses has resulted in lower classes numbers, with six students taking 354X during the fall semester, from which Roth and Olinger were the only two who elected to take subsequent course, Perkins and his students are optimistic. The lessons of the course are invaluable, and Perkins says he prefers smaller classes because he gets the chance to work more closely with his students.
“This is really more like when I mentor a young engineer in the design firm I work for,” Perkins adds. “I think these two will leave this class knowing more than any of their peers about designing mechanical systems and understanding how they work and how they consume energy.”
Olinger appreciates the conversational aspect of the class. “When we are talking about something that one of us is having a hard time understanding, we can say to him that we need to spend more time on it or even bring up other issues he may not have planned on teaching about,” he says.
The experience of working with designers is something Perkins, Olinger, and Roth agree will be one of the most beneficial things about the collaboration, as they had to learn to compromise and work with tradeoffs.
“Engineers and architects think differently and have distinct approaches,” says Perkins. “Architects are the form aspect of buildings while engineers are more of the function part. It’s not that one viewpoint is right or wrong, they just each have their own priorities, and the truth is the answer is probably somewhere in between the two.”
Not only did the ConE students need to understand the priorities of the architects, but they also had to translate their analyses into terms the architects could understand to allow for a full evaluation of the options, a skill Perkins says will take the students a long way in the workforce.
“In industry, owners aren’t going to be able to understand a lot of the technical details, but if you are able to explain important economic factors like the internal rate of return, business-oriented people will be able to understand and make a decision based on that information,” Perkins says.
In addition to the technical skills the students learned, Perkins adds the lesson of collaboration is also important. “This project consisted of engineering students working with College of Design students on a project shared between Iowa State and the University of Iowa. This sort of a cross-university collaboration is crucial to the growth and advancement of our state’s educational system,” he says. “And within industry, working together provides the opportunity for more, and often times better, ideas to surface so the result ends up being the best possible option.”