Not all hot air
2 Nov 2008
It’s an inconvenient truth that the Tower building is not the greenest building on campus. As the university’s focal point, the Tower has become the centrepiece in the challenge of reducing the carbon footprint of existing UTS buildings.
Rising to this challenge is a unique postgraduate Engineering subject. Revised this year to reflect current environmental issues, the Energy Conversion subject takes advantage of the growing drive for sustainability both in the university and at a national level.
“When we relaunched the subject this year, we realised that there was commitment from students, academic and support staff all over the university working on projects to enhance energy efficiency in UTS buildings,” says course convener Dr Jaffar Madadnia.
“Staff were ready to work on collaborative projects and support student projects with funding, so I modified the subject to become project-based. We want to lead by example and show that sustainability is a goal everyone must attain,” says Madadnia.
Each student enrolled in the subject proposed a concept to enhance energy efficiency at UTS. The concepts were then presented to staff from Engineering and from the Facilities Management Unit (FMU), who selected the five most feasible ideas to be developed and implemented.
“When I first started the subject I was a bit sceptical,” says Mechanical Engineering student Antony Henry. “I didn’t really believe that these projects would really be implemented. But when Peter Lewis from facilities came and told us he had money to spend on the projects, then we got excited. Dr Madadnia was very supportive. He told us that we had no boundaries, we could have all the help we wanted and that it was going to be a real-time project.”
Henry’s energy-saving idea was to recover excess heat from the city campus boiler system (see below). It was one of those selected for development. He was joined by Master of Engineering Management student Kavit Pandya and they made it their mission to get the project implemented – which it will be over the summer break.
Both agree the collaboration they experienced through the project was a big highlight. “We worked with engineers from FMU and they helped us a lot,” says Henry. Committed staff members Eric Liyanage and Peter Lewis gave time to developing the student project. “They helped us with the financial and management aspects of it. We also went to Macquarie University to study their cogeneration plant, which is already established, and Technical Services Manager Kerry Russell really helped us there. We contacted lots of suppliers – Australian companies as well as foreign companies,” Henry says.
The collaborative work done in Energy Conversion doesn’t stop at the edge of campus. Randwick Boys’ High and Cranbrook schools have both benefited from seminars on reducing their carbon footprint, and UTS is undertaking environmental impact studies for their main campus at Bellevue Hill and a new facility being built on their Rose Bay campus.
Pandya says this is unlike any other subject he’s done. “I don’t have any experience right now; after finishing my Bachelor’s in India I came straight here. So this project is good for developing my résumé. I will probably get a job based on that. I have my fingers crossed!”
Henry agrees. “It’s great to experience a real project with a real client, meeting real suppliers – it’s like a bridge between study and the real world.”
The project
The UTS city campus is heated by a hot water system consisting of three natural gas-fired boilers. The boilers also provide hot water in buildings 1, 2 and 4. The exhaust gases from these boilers reach 250 degrees celsius. The gas is wasted energy which will now be put through a heat exchanger to pre-heat the cold water entering the boilers. This will potentially reduce the amount of energy needed to heat the water from cold by 2997 gigajoules per year, avoiding the release of 208.9 tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere – the equivalent of 24 average Australian households’ annual CO2 emissions.
Jo Chipperfield
Photographer: Izanda Ford
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