Construction Scholarship Recipient
Energy Audit Kits
CNET (Construction Engineering Technology program) student Javier Altamirano recently won a TEXO Education Foundation scholarship and received his award during the 2011 ASC/TEXO Region V Student Competition Awards Dinner in Dallas. He was in one of the UNT teams at the competition. He is a senior for the 2011-2012 school year and expects to graduate in December 2012. His plans after graduation are to work for a company in the construction industry and eventually pursue a master’s degree in construction management. “Javier is one of the outstanding students in the CNET program. His TEXO award reflects on his hard work and commitment to the career path he has chosen. We certainly appreciate the support from the industry,” said Dr. Cheng Yu, assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Technology. TEXO is the largest commercial contractors association in Texas and one of the largest affiliated with the national Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc. (ABC) and The Associated General Contractors of America (AGC). The TEXO Foundation raises money throughout the year through the support of TEXO members. Much of these funds raised are for use in supporting the Region V universities and students.
The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and AirConditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) recently awarded a grant for a senior design project titled “Harvesting Built Environments for Global and Accessible Modular Energy Audit Training.” The UNT project involves the development of an economical building energy auditing kit for a senior design project. The team has made site visits to Preston Tower in Dallas, which is a high-rise residential building the students intend to audit to improve its energy efficiency. One of the team’s important initial findings is that the windows of Preston Tower were installed almost 40 years ago, and the weather stripping and seals have degraded to a point where the building envelope is no longer sealed tight. The conventional method to evaluate infiltration is called a “Blower Door Test,” which sucks the air out of a room, dropping the internal room pressure about 50 Pascals below ambient. The test protocol assumes that the building envelope is tight enough to establish a measurable 50 Pa pressure difference. However, some buildings are so poorly sealed that the initial 50 Pa pressure difference required to perform a Blower Door Test cannot be achieved. Anticipating this case might be true for Preston Tower, the students devised a new Blower Door Test protocol. The students recently took delivery of a blower door from Infiltec using funds from ASHRAE. They have already used this new piece of building energy audit equipment to test their new protocol.
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