Solar Decathlon Europe is an international competition among universities which promotes interdisciplinary learning in engineering and architecture. Students from different disciplines participate in teams guided by several professors during a 29 month preparation period plus five weeks of on-site contest. The educational project involves designing, building and testing a solar energy house connected to the electrical grid with the strategy of maximizing self-consumption, supported by bioclimatic technologies and maintaining a low environmental footprint. It culminates in a on-site contest in which teams must assembly the house themselves, test it with ordinary real life tasks and finally disassembly it. The event has also a divulgative aim, trying to make students and visitors get interested in discovering the problems presented by real engineering and architecture applications. In addition, SDE covers R&D aspects in different fields such as energy efficiency, solar energy and bioclimatic architecture. This article presents the methodology followed during the SDE 2012 edition, in which more than 850 students participated. The obtained results show that the educational competition was a success according to the technical and professional ambitions of the students, most of them considering that their knowledge had increased in areas related to technical and multidisciplinary aspects.
Solar Decathlon Europe (SDE) is an international multidisciplinary competition in which 20 university teams build and operate energy-efficient solar-powered houses. The aim of SDE is not only scientific but also educational and divulgative, making visitors to understand the problems presented by real engineering applications and architecture. From a research perspective, the energy data gathered during the competition constitutes a very promising information for the analysis and understanding of the photovoltaic systems, grid structures, energy balances and energy efficiency of the set of houses. This article focuses on the electrical energy components of SDE competition, the energy performance of the houses and the strategies and behaviors followed by the teams. The rules evaluate the houses' electrical energy self-sufficiency by looking at the electricity autonomy in terms of aggregated electrical energy balance; the temporary generation-consumption profile pattern correlation; and the use of electricity per measurable area. Although the houses are evaluated under the same climatological and consumption conditions, production results are very different due to the specific engineering solutions (different electrical topologies, presence or absence of batteries, diverse photovoltaic module solutions, etc.).
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