Solar Decathlon heats up

While most Tech students are enjoying the summer sunshine, a team of engineers is hard at work harnessing that light into usable energy. The Tech Solar Decathlon team, comprised of three team leaders, seven faculty advisors and over 50 students, has been chosen to compete in the U.S. Department of Energy's biannual Solar Decathlon Contest in Washington, D.C. Oct.2-22, 2007.

The Solar Decathlon is an international event where 20 collegiate teams compete to design and construct the most appealing and energy-efficient solar-powered house.

Tech is in competition with 15 teams from the United States, as well as teams from Puerto Rico, Germany, Canada and Spain.

Teams receive points for design elements such as architecture, engineering and energy balance, as well as points for working elements of the house such as hot water, lighting and appliances.

Tech's Solar Decathlon project, begun in spring 2006, is now nearing completion. The construction of the 800-square-foot house signaled the sixth and final phase of the project during the summer of 2007.

The house, located at 575 Fourteenth Street (the corner of Fourteenth and Hemphill Avenue behind the Institute of Paper, Science and Technology building) is set to leave Atlanta at the end of September for Washington, D.C., where it will spend 22 days "on mall," or in competition.

At the close of the competition, the house will travel back to Atlanta, where it will be open for public tours in spring 2008. The project will also be used as a public outreach project for Atlanta citizens and school children to raise awareness of energy recycling and conservation.

The Solar Decathlon team represents a wide variety of Tech students, pulling its participants from the College of Architecture, the College of Engineering, the College of Management and the College of Sciences. Lead by College of Architecture professors Chris Jarrett, Ruchi Choudhary and Franca Trubiano, the team is well-prepared for their upcoming event.

The competition consists of 10 contests: architecture (worth 200 points), engineering and market viability (each worth 150 points), communications, comfort zone, appliances, hot water, lighting, energy balance and getting around (which are each worth 100 points).

In the market viability contest, a panel of jurors evaluates the aesthetic characteristics of the house and its potential market value, as well as its ease of production. The houses must also be able to maintain a "comfortable" atmospheric temperature and level of humidity, specific temperatures inside a refrigerator and freezer and certain conditions for lighting.

In addition to the mechanical aspects, the teams must also engineer their houses to complete a series of household tasks.

The teams must wash and dry 12 towels for two days, cook and serve meals for four days, clean dishes using a dishwasher for four days, operate a TV/video player for six hours and run a computer eight hours a day for five days. Additionally, the house must be able to charge a street-legal, commercially available vehicle.

The communications portion of the competition requires the teams to present their projects to a wide audience via web sites and public tours. The team members are responsible for giving tours to jurors, who then assign a score based on how knowledgeable the tour guides are about their project, experience and the competition as a whole.

The web sites are judged by a panel who visits each site and assigns a score based on how informative it is, how readily available the information is and how easy the web site is to find. For more information on Tech's Solar Decathlon project, visit the team's web site at www.solar.gatech.edu.