Page 33 - College Planning & Management, April 2017

Facilities CAMPUS SPACES
The Boiler Room Is the Classroom
What will students see when they look inside an advanced campus HVAC system? High-tech HVAC systems can serve as living labs.
BY BERT VALDMAN
STUDENTS AND PROFESSORS RARELY GIVE A thought to the machinery and systems that run their campus — unless something goes wrong and they end up
sweating or shivering. But college and university physical plants could serve as more than unseen controllers of the classroom environment; they could be the classroom.
Facilities leaders faced with curtailing rising costs and meeting sustainability targets while keeping building occupants comfort- able and maintaining climate control for labs and other sensitive spaces need increasingly sophisticated systems to achieve their
goals. These systems justify themselves based on hard-dollar returns on investment. But looking at them only through that lens misses a significant opportunity to contribute to the institution’s educational mission.
Campus physical plants that have become “Internets of things” — requiring cloud-based management, machine learning and visualization tools — could be living labs for students. Mechanical engineering students could explore the plant with managers and en- gineers to see how a cutting-edge HVAC system works, for example, and visualization tools could bring the plant into the classroom.
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