Student Work

Students were challenged to design a portable IAQ health meter that will detect contaminants in a space and display the levels of different toxins to the user. The system should identify related IAQ issues and provide solutions and/or next steps to solve these problems. The system shall consider multiple system variables, including space temperature, humidity, contaminant level (as outlined in ASHRAE 62.1 Table C), and outdoor condition. The data that is gathered from the sensor could also benefit other users, so a way to share collected information should also be investigated.

A senior project team of four HVAC&R mechanical engineers were tasked with the design of a walk-in, partitionable climate chamber running with a transcritical CO2 refrigeration cycle. The chamber design is to be constructed as a future project, and then the chamber would be used for years to come to give students hands-on experience with a state-of-the-art CO2 system and for the department to run experiments.

Students were tasked to present the methods and decisions that went into selecting an HVAC system for a single-story laboratory facility in Cairo, Egypt. This 2,515 m2 (27,000 ft2) new construction contains a variety of rooms, including wet bench labs, dry bench computational labs, research support offices, a common area for circulation, a break room, and an atrium reception area. The owner specified building requirements including a budget, operating hours, and a space function analysis.

This project involved a new 5-story (around 500 bed) student housing building on the California State University Long Beach (CSULB) campus which has net-zero energy usage. For this project, students worked directly with Glumac – an MEP firm specializing in cost effective sustainable building design – to influence building massing and orientation and select an effective HVAC system for the space. This building will include many different types of rooms including common areas for many different functions such as kitchens, recreation, and study spaces. The building will mainly be comprised of single, double, and triple occupancy rooms with centralized restrooms on each floor. Each space presents a different design challenge and will factor into our final decision of a system. One of the main goals of this project is to achieve the net zero classification for the building and LEED Platinum Equivalence.