ASHRAE Ireland Student Awards 2021/22

The 2021/22 ASHRAE Ireland Student Awards were announced during our technical presentation with Dr. Tom Lawrence on October 15^th, 2021. Three well-deserved recipients were awarded the top prize from their respective institutions. The goal of the Student Awards Program is to recognise the contributions of members of ASHRAE student branches to fields related to the Built Environment such as HVAC&R, Building Engineering, Energy Management and Sustainability. The three award recipients will be enrolled in the ASHRAE SmartStart Program (valued at $225), which covers ASHRAE membership and enables them to access a wealth of technical resources and guidelines for 3 years after graduation. This will be a huge benefit to these young engineers in the early stages of their career, helping to advance their technical and professional development.

The 2021 ASHRAE Student Award recipients are:

Paulo Lissa, Ph.D. Graduate (NUIG)

Paulo graduated with a PhD in Civil Engineering from the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), and currently works in the Netherlands with Energyworx. In his PhD thesis, Paulo aims to investigate and demonstrate how reinforcement learning can improve residential energy management systems control. Several simulated experiments were conducted based on real demand response projects, applying multiple reinforcement learning algorithms, such as Q-learning and deep Q-networks, thus proving the efficacy of such techniques in this domain.

Alexander Yusko, BSc(Eng.Sc), ME(Mech) (UCD)

Alexander graduated with a Master of Engineering (ME) in Mechanical Engineering. He is currently working in New York in the Energy Sector. His thesis focused on the using PCMs passively for both winter and summer conditions under demand response conditions. The research analysed the performance of PCMs using EnergyPlus when applied under continental climate conditions (i.e., Madrid).

Aaron Mansfield, B.Sc. (MTU)

Aaron has graduated with a 1st Class Honors Degree in Sustainable Energy Engineering. He is currently working with EM3 as a Graduate Engineer. In his final year project, a transient thermal model of an electric vehicles cabin and HVAC system has been developed and validated using test data from Argonne National Laboratory. The work also considered the use of a heat pump instead of a PTC heater.

You can view a recording of the awards presentation below (Skip to 53:50)

ASHRAE Ireland will continue supporting the Student Awards Program in 2022. For more information regarding the nomination process, please contact your local Student Branch Advisor/President or the Student Activities Committee Chair: http://ashrae-ireland.org/students/