2022 HVAC&R Student Paper Competition

The 2022 ASHRAE HVAC&R Student Paper Competition concluded on January 17^th with presentations from four finalists.

The competition is aimed at students working on their Bachelor or Master’s degree who are members of ASHRAE. The paper submitted must be based on an accepted BS or MS thesis.

In addition to the paper, the students prepared a poster and a 10-minute presentation, which was followed by questions from the jury.

The jury selected Brett Stinson as the winner of the 2022 competition. Brett is a fourth-year mechanical engineering student working on an undergraduate degree at Portland State University (PSU). He is the president of PSU's ASHRAE chapter and the recipient of this year's society-level Reuben Trane Scholarship. The title of his paper is “Determining Airflows and Volatile Organic Compound Source Strengths for an Occupied School.”

Mr. Stinson will represent ASHRAE at the 2022 HVAC World Student Competition to be held in conjunction with the 14th REHVA World Congress CLIMA 2022, May 22-25, in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Travel expenses, hotel and conference registration will be paid by ASHRAE.

The other finalists were:

• Hugo Lam, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, “Data-driven Energy Usage Pattern Identification for Improving Energy Performance of Campus Buildings”
• Ranjith Narasimhamurthy, University of California, Davis, “Diagnosing and Remote Sealing of Leakage in Low-Pressure Sections of Natural Gas Distribution Networks”
• Indra Permana, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan, “Performance Investigation of a Novel Positive and Negative Pressurized Operating Room for Infection Control”

The jurors were Joe Firrantello, Bill Bahnfleth, Tim Dwyer, Joe Firrantello and Jared Larson.