A group of University of Central Florida (UCF) students mentored by Hanson’s Nate Boyd, P.E., CPMP, LEED AP®, a mechanical engineer and energy specialist, won a first-place award in an ASHRAE student competition.

The five-member team from UCF took the top spot for the integrated sustainable building design category. Nate, on behalf of ASHRAE’s Central Florida Chapter, was the team’s technical adviser for the student design competition, which challenged teams to design an energy-efficient, two-story municipal government building in Beijing. The UCF students studied different alternatives for the building’s HVAC system and presented a water source variable refrigerant flow system, with an optimized geothermal water loop, as the best option.

Nate is very familiar with the competition — he participated in 2010, when he was a student at UCF. His team won first place in the HVAC system design category for that year’s contest, which featured a mock design of Florida Hospital’s Ginsburg Tower.