Santa Clara University

Solar Decathlon

Santa Clara's secret to success: thoughtful design and a fighting spirit

Santa Clara University’s 2007 Solar Decathlon team was considered a long shot when students and faculty began preparing for this celebrated international contest. Santa Clara would be competing against 19 schools from across the globe, many with architecture programs, decathlon experience, and much larger student bodies.

So Santa Clara’s success was that much sweeter when the team placed third overall, beating out schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and Cornell University.

Thoughtful design fueled Santa Clara’s impressive finish. The Santa Clara house included cutting-edge structural materials, a flexible photovoltaic heating system, water-fired coolants, and centralized computer energy monitors. The students used sustainable materials throughout, including insulation from recycled blue jeans, kitchen tiles from recycled bottles, a deck from recycled plastic, and outdoor furniture from recycled wine barrels. The house was designed and built on the Santa Clara campus and trucked to Washington, D.C., where it was rebuilt on the National Mall and viewed by more than 200,000 people.

The team’s accomplishments included groundbreaking innovations. Solar Decathlon team advisor Mark Aschheim, professor of civil engineering, was inspired to use bamboo to frame the house. Though the quick-growing material has become popular for flooring and cabinetry, it hadn’t been used structurally. Bamboo is lightweight, resists fire and decay, grows in more conditions than traditional lumber trees, and is a sustainable alternative to steel. Drawing on the work of earlier engineering students (particularly Mark Folgner, B.S. civil engineering ’05), team member Raymond Lam, B.S. civil engineering ’08, formed strong cross sections from laminated bamboo sheets, creating I-beams that can support up to 10,000 pounds. The Santa Clara team became the first designers in the country to have bamboo certified as a structural support material.

The students built flexibility into the house’s key solar elements: the heating systems for air and water. Assistance came from Mechanical Engineering Professor Jorge González, who teaches thermodynamics and conducts research on solar thermal technologies. The photovoltaic system can operate independently, as it did during the competition, or supplement a connection to a traditional power grid.

The Santa Clara house also had a system for keeping things cool when it was too sunny outside: a solar-thermal absorption chiller. This water-fired system had a non-toxic, environmentally friendly refrigerant, and a centralized computer system to track energy expenditures, with dozens of sensors monitoring resource demands in the house.

Ultimately, the house presented livable solutions to current environmental problems. Santa Clara will be taking these ideas, and new ones, to the next Solar Decathlon in 2009—along with the school’s indomitable spirit.

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