Sustainable School Design

This is a project that I did with my teammates that utilises different features that make a conceptual school more sustainable. We came up with many ideas and is made through CAD and real-life modelling. This is a step-by-step walkthrough of how we did it!

For CAD prototyping we used Autodesk Fusion and SketchUp. Both of them are free to use and are really helpful!

Materials we used for physical prototyping:

• Corrugated cardboard
• Popsicle sticks
• Twisting plush sticks
• Coloured card / paper

Supplies:

• Scissors
• Tape (any)
• Superglue
• Hot glue

Electronics:

• Arduino Uno
• Cables
• LEDs
• Breadboard (optional)
• Resistors

We we provided with the problem of buildings being not sustainable and we have to attempt and reduce the carbon footprint made. These are the ideas that we came up with which include the Design problem and methods that can be used in our design.

We did some research into the topic and finalised some ideas for the project. The material choices are of low embodied carbon levels to reduce the carbon footprint. Renewable energy, such as wind and solar are used in the building. A rainwater collection system is in place to save energy.

We finalised our idea and above are the sketches we made. We used Autodesk Fusion to create our initial rough idea. Firstly, we made sketches of the base of the building and the blocks represent different buildings of the school. It is located on top of a hill so the rainwater collection system is located beneath the main building (brown) and the swimming pool (white). This helped us know which goes where and what our final design would look like.

We used SketchUp for this part of the design. After evaluating our Fusion model we figured out the placement of different components like the solar panels and the wind turbines. We added them to our design. We also added more plants in the building as they provide shade and save up a lot of energy.

We created a physical prototype of the building using arts and crafts supplies. All of the sustainable features can be seen. For the LED system, we made a simple circuit with an Arduino Uno and 3 coloured LEDs to test our energy savings. Overall this project was a success as we were able to integrate many features that decreased energy consumption levels and were more sustainable.