by Shane Henson — August 31, 2012—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that a University of Maryland team has won the Department’s first Max Tech and Beyond Appliance Design Competition. This competition aims to stimulate the development of ultra-low energy use appliances in an educational context that develops the professional capacity of a new generation of design engineers, says the DOE.
The University of Maryland team chose to simplify the design of a standard wall-mounted air conditioner by separating the systems that remove humidity and provide cooling. After the students tested a fully functional prototype, they found that the design reduced energy use by 30% compared with typical wall-mounted air conditioners already on the market. Since the largest consumer of electricity in most homes nationwide is the air-conditioning system, this innovative design has the potential to substantially decrease residential energy use and save consumers money, notes the DOE.
The Maryland team, led by Professor Yunho Hwang, competed alongside eight other faculty-led student design teams from universities across the United States. The teams were competitively selected and funded by the DOE to design, build, and test their prototypes during the 2011-2012 academic year. The runner-up team from Marquette University developed a prototype of a natural-gas-fired combination water heater and clothes dryer that can use the waste heat from the clothes dryer to heat water for the next washing load. The team demonstrated that with this approach, they could get a 10% dryer efficiency improvement compared with the best comparable products on the market.
The nine competing student teams received up to $20,000 to design and test commercially viable innovative appliances built to save families and businesses money. A panel of DOE and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory experts judged each team’s prototype based on its demonstrated ability to reduce energy use by 10% or more compared to best-on-market products, or the prototype’s ability to reduce production costs compared with typical high-efficiency products already on the market by 20% or more.
