Thursday, April 17, 2008

UNH team takes top prize in green-design contest

A team of University of New Hampshire business and engineering students has won first place in their task at the 2008 Environmental Design Contest at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, N.M.

This year's team, Retrolutions, retrofitted an existing commercial building to reduce its environmental footprint. The students' project was a plan to retrofit a building in Phoenix. They designed three technologies -- a gray-water recycling system, a solar concentrating energy production system, and a compressed-air-enhanced evaporative-cooling system -- that could be implemented to minimize the building's energy and water demands.

Jeffrey Sohl, director of the UNH Center for Venture Research and a former engineer, was a faculty adviser on the project.

The 14-member team has been invited to present their project at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science Forum in Washington, in May.

The competition, which was held April 6-9, is sponsored by WERC: A Consortium for Environmental Education and Technology Development, and challenges student teams to develop solutions for real-world environmental problems. Thirty-three teams from 23 universities including 190 participants around the world competed.