ASHRAE has announced the winners of its 2026 Student Design Competition, Setty Family Foundation Applied Engineering Challenge and Building Energy Quotient Competition. The competitions covered HVAC&R, building sciences and engineering, with the 2026 student design competition focused on a new building being added to a university campus in Colorado.
SVERI’s College of Engineering Pandharpur took first place in HVAC Design Calculations, while a University of Hong Kong team won the HVAC System Selection category. Universitas Indonesia received first place in the Setty Family Foundation Net Zero Energy Design category.
In the Setty Family Foundation Applied Engineering Challenge, students were asked to design a residential system that rejects heat into domestic hot water and absorbs heat from domestic cold-water systems for space heating and cooling. A Bandung Institute of Technology team won with HYDEX, described as a modular residential GSHP retrofit that acts as a thermal battery. The project captures waste heat from greywater and the heat-pump system, stores it in stratified buffer tanks and redirects it to improve HVAC efficiency and preheat domestic water while reducing energy consumption, operating costs and carbon emissions.
The Building Energy Quotient Competition gave students experience assessing energy use in operational buildings and working with building owners. Participants evaluated and audited building energy consumption and used ASHRAE Building EQ online tools to give buildings a Building EQ score. University of Washington ASHRAE at UW received first place.
The winning projects will be recognized during the 2027 ASHRAE Winter Conference, scheduled for January 23–27, 2027, in Chicago, Illinois. The conference will be held in conjunction with the ASHRAE co-sponsored AHR Expo, scheduled for January 25–27 at McCormick Place Convention Center.
