Students within the HVAC program received an opportunity to go and present their project to a group of their peers.
Two students involved with the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning program presented their work to a group of about 450 students in Las Vegas, Nevada last year.
They were awarded with a $5000 grant for the program. This is the highest grant they could have received and this is the first time for a community college to win the grant.
“Not very many community college students attend this. This is almost all attended by four year students and graduate students. Mostly Juniors and Seniors and graduate students. So, that in and of itself I thought was pretty cool,” Marcks said.
Although the work was done by four students, it was driven by instructor Russell Marcks, a professor of the HVAC program.
The project simulated a chiller, which is basically an air conditioner, but instead of producing air, it produces chilled water.
The students were able to work with and simulate different problems using a prototype of the chiller for a portion of a semester.
Marcks came up with the idea for the prototype, so that students wouldn’t have to touch the $15,000 machine that is in the lab. Instead, they could mess with the prototype, so that they could learn how to solve problems.
“The chiller is an expensive piece of equipment. We can’t afford that to go down and we only have one, but we have six of those boards [prototypes]. I would be able to do the same thing, much more safely.”
The chiller can be very dangerous with the amount of volts running through it, so Marcks said that he was able to take the high amount of volts out of the prototype so that students could safely work with it.
According to Marcks, most of the technology in the HVAC lab has come from grant money that the program has received.
“It is a grant that is judged by a subcommittee at Ashrae and it just so happened that this grant was judged last year as number one; it scored number one,” Marcks said.
Ashrae is an organization devoted to the advancement of indoor-environment-control technology in the HVAC industry.
Although four students worked on the project, only two were able to attend for free, so Marcks extended the invitation to the two graduating students.
“These guys were able to go Las Vegas and present to their peers, in a very major setting, something that they did and it’s just not done at the two year level,” Marcks said.
The students are still working with the different prototypes, so that they can learn from it. The students who worked on this project are Paul Hawkins, Kenneth Wooten, Adam Ferguson and Jacob Lee. Hawkins and Wooten, who presented the prototype, will be graduating from the HVAC program.
Laina Yost
Managing Editor