Experiences and methodology in a multidisciplinary energy and architecture competition: Solar Decathlon Europe 2012

Abstract

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.

Building energy-consumption status worldwide and the state-of-the-art technologies for zero-energy buildings during the past decade

“…The scientific knowledge behind the Solar Decathlon can be found in a special issue in Energy and Buildings [121], such as passive solutions [122], electrical energy balance [123] and BIPV [124], etc. This competition provide a great opportunity to share the latest design strategies and demonstration of ZEB to the industry and public.…”

Electrical energy balance contest in Solar Decathlon Europe 2012

“…The PV installation size was limited to 10 kW of all power conditioning equipment connected to PV generation (DC/DC and/or DC/AC), as well as the storage system maximum capacity was limited to 5 kW. This values are reasonable to get high levels of self-consumption and limit the excessive differences between teams due to increased budget availability [14].…”

“…SDE has taken place in two editions celebrated in Madrid: SDE 2010 andSDE2012 [14]. During the final phase of the competition, teams had to assemble their houses in Madrid, in a place open to the public ('Villa Solar') which allowed visiting all houses.…”

Comfort analysis applied to the international standard “Active House”: The case of RhOME, the winning prototype of Solar Decathlon 2014

“…The goal of the Solar Decathlon is to design a small building autonomous from the energy point of view according to the Zero Energy Building definition [37]. The prototypes should be designed to meet specific requirements and to face specific criticisms, according to the external and socio-cultural context decided by the teams and often these houses become real examples of innovation [38,39]. RhOME building (namely "a home for Rome") was an apartment of a multi-storey social housing, aiming at being a future model for cities densification.…”