Tag: Tom Collins

Presenter: Hannah Ward

Co-presenters: Alex Collins and Julia Frost

Mentors: Alison Kwok and Tom Collins, Architecture

Poster: 64

Major: Architecture

According to the City of Eugene’s website, newly constructed bathrooms must either have an operable window or “a venting system capable of 50 cubic feet per minute” controlled by “a dehumidistat, timer, or similar means of automatic control.”1 Spaces that do not provide enough ventilation can often be susceptible to damage such as mold growth and dry rot if humidity levels reach a certain point and stay there consistently. As Eugene is a mild and humid climate, many buildings have issues with mold growth because of high humidity levels. This study will assess which ventilation strategies are supportive in reducing humidity levels and ultimately preventing mold growth in a damp climate, such as Eugene. Specifically, this study will test the hypothesis that apartments with continuous bathroom ventilation systems are more capable of maintaining 50% RH [relative humidity] than apartments with non-continuous bathroom ventilation systems. To test the hypothesis, the study used a two-phase approach, which included four HOBO data loggers2 to record the relative humidity of three different apartment bathrooms using three different styles of ventilation, before testing the capacity of airflow from the two bath fans. Our results show that active ventilation techniques are not the only effective way to ventilate a space and, in fact, one of the bathrooms using an active fan actually performed worse than a comparable, passively ventilated bathroom.

Presenter: Jericho Bankston

Co-Presenters: Joey Moser, Abdulhadi Almumen, Brad Phillips

Mentors: Alison Kwok and Tom Collins, Architecture

Poster: 2

Major: Architecture 

Working with American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) standards we were tasked to design building components and systems to effectively meet zero-net energy standards for a Junior College in Doha, Qatar. The building site needs to be determined as well as systems to implement to meet zero-net energy, reduce site and building water use as well as maintain comfortable interior spaces relative to natural day lighting, humidity and air temperature. It is crucially important to implement RES in a manner that takes into consideration the life expectancy of the building and the maintenance that goes into the systems needed to attain zero-net energy. Through minimizing solar heat gain and using passive house standards the cooling load can be reduced. This allows the use of PV arrays to reduce heat island effect and offset the on-site energy that is used. Upon preliminary solar gain calculations it is believed that more energy than necessary can be produced for the Junior College allowing excess renewable energy to be sold back to the city of Qatar.