Providing Systems Engineering Perspective in a Capstone Project Setting to Monitor Performance of HVAC Systems

Today's engineering problems require complex solutions from multiple disciplines. Hence, engineering classes should teach students to learn about how to solve multidisciplinary problems. This paper describes a project-based course that allows a group of students to learn and utilize knowledge and approaches from multiple disciplines and to gain systems engineering perspective to solve a real-world problem. The objective of the project is to develop a system that can facilitate the monitoring and analysis of the performance of HVAC systems, which account for about 40% of total energy consumption in buildings. Students with various backgrounds worked together to develop a prototype system that automatically collects dynamic data from HVAC systems and visualizes the real-time and historical data with floor plans using a web-browser-based interface. This prototype system also embeds fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) algorithms that frequently analyze the performance of HVAC systems. In developing such a system, the students had to learn and utilize knowledge in the domains of civil, mechanical, electrical engineering, computer science, and project management, and approach the problem from a systems engineering perspective. This paper discusses the processes that the students went through to learn, implement and test the system in a real-world testbed.