HVAC DESIGN SCIENCE

Designing & Building Energy Efficient Environments

The first role of the engineer is to apply science to the solution of human needs. As a young engineer, that was what attracted me to the profession.  During my 29 year career,  I believe I have seen it all. 

As project engineer I find it useful to focus on the how's and wherefores as much as the solution itself. As time passes, I see everyone around me dealing more and more with a flood of information. (More on information overload below).

Engineering teams collaborate, coordinate and otherwise exchange information with their architectural clients and owners. It seems that design and documentation of a building can be more complicated than the building itself. 

Get my latest report, "Building Information Modeling" and from 2005 "Information Age and Construction".  Architects, developers and owners, all related specialists, engage in an agonizing business of design and construction. It can be complicated in your specialty area. Most challenging is the constant need to synchronize your work with a dozen or more other engineers, architects and designers.

The exchange of design information should be accelerating smoothly, spurred by the ubiquity of the internet and high speed desktop computing. But in fact, the only thing smooth is the marketing. For me as an HVAC engineer, IT has made in advancements in, but it has not necessarily made our jobs as engineers any easier.

Whenever I see a project through anymore, I am always wondering how the project can be better organized or decomposed. I think of it as a puzzle to be simplified. I would break the project designers tasks down to:

• Collect information
• Collect more information
• Calculate and evaluate
• Design
• Vendor contact
• Evaluate
• Design some more
• Etc.
• Repeat

For HVAC, much of this is boils down to optimization of temperature, heat exchange and air exchange for maximum human comfort, energy efficiency, ease of maintenance, and initial cost. Simple, eh?  The rest of the HVAC engineers work:

• Creating order from the chaos of building and equipment information
• Scheduling equipment information
• Creating drawings (3D preferably)
• Checking other disciplines for physical collisions

The mechanical contractors work:

• Pricing the work
• Coordinating the construction with other trades

Better design leads to a holistic view of the built environment, both literally and figuratively.

• Total design documentation
• Design processes using Building Information Modeling(BIM)
• Best green practices.

There is a lot of change happening in this realm and opportunity.