Interdisciplinary Team Places Second in Race to Zero Student Design Competition
An interdisciplinary team of Illinois Tech students from Armour College of Engineering and the College of Architecture, finished second in the Urban Single Family Home category, at the 2017 Department of Energy (DOE) Race to Zero Student Design Competition. This was the second year in a row that an Illinois Tech team placed in the competition.
The team, Bronzeville Residence Optimized for Net Zero Energy (B.R.O.N.Z.E.), consisted of engineering students Lindsey Rice (ARCE, 5th year), Alexander Mitchell (AE, 5th year), Julia del Pino Torres (ARCE, M.Eng. Student), and Ariel White (ARCE, M.S. Student); in addition to architecture students Elmira Hosseinkhani and Ezgi Bay. The team was mentored by CAEE adjunct faculty member, Edoarda Corradi Dell’ Acqua and additionally advised by Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering, Brent Stephens. View the team's presentation and project summary to learn more.
Corradi Dell' Acqua incorporated the competition into a new project-based two-part course open to both engineering and architecture students: CAE 556 Net Zero Energy Home Design Competition I and CAE 557 Net Zero Energy Home Design Competition II.
Second Place B.R.O.N.Z.E. Team's Design
The course also produced a second qualifying team, The Capacitators, who competed in the Small Multi Family Housing Contest. That team consisted of engineering students Naveen Sudhakaran (ARCE, M.Eng. Student), Surafeal Mandefro (ARCE, M.S. Student), Keonho Lim (ARCE, 5th year), Xu Zhang (ARCE, M.S. Student), and Claire Schauble (ME, 4th year); as well as Architecture student Mohammad Hossein Abbasi.
This year’s competition featured 39 teams from 33 universities across four countries who were tasked with creating a new house design or redesigning an existing floorplan to meet the competition’s cost-effective, high-performance home energy requirements. Students presented their final innovative designs to a panel of national experts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. These experts included leading high-performance home builders, architects, building science professionals, building product manufacturer experts, and national laboratory research scientists.
The competition engages university students to design zero energy ready homes, buildings that can offset all or most of its annual energy consumption with renewable energy sources. The intent of the competition is to inspire next-generation architects, engineers, and construction managers to apply the latest building science innovations to new and existing homes. The competition recognizes students who excel at integrating building science principles into designs for zero energy ready homes, including creative solutions to real-world problems.
Corradi will be leading another set of teams next year, so interested and qualified students should register for CAE 556 in the fall 2017 semester and CAE 557 in the spring 2018 semester.
