ARE 3401 - Principles of Mechanical Engineering for Buildings

• Classify and describe a complete air-conditioning and distribution system including its major hardware components
• Analyze the physiological considerations for human comfort in buildings and calculate its related indices
• Describe outdoor and indoor thermal design conditions
• Calculate the heating and cooling coil loads for a building
• Describe design principles for both supply side and waste/vent side plumbing based on the importance of the health, safety, and welfare of people
• Calculate plumbing line sizes for both the water supply service piping and distribution piping within a building
• Describe how water quality is determined and identify which water treatment technologies are used to remove a given type of contaminant
• Explain the importance of active and passive fire protection systems for helping to ensure a safe building environment
• Describe how building energy and water use impacts the larger environment
• Analyze two or more building air conditioning and/or plumbing systems using the principles of life cycle assessment and the Triple Bottom Line to determine which is the most sustainable

• Steady state 1st Law of Thermodynamics energy analysis of open systems
• Thermophysical properties of pure fluids
• Properties of moist air and ability to read the psychrometric chart
• One dimensional, steady state combined conduction and convection heat transfer using the electric resistance analogy to determine equivalent thermal resistances
• Finding major and minor losses associated with internal pipe flows
• Calculating pressure losses in piping systems using both the Darcy Weisbach and Hazen Williams equations
• Principles of fans and pumps; ability to read a pump curve and find the pump system curve for a given application

• Basic forced air system schematic and principle of operation; how multizone, dual duct, and variable air volume (VAV) systems allow for building HVAC zoning
• Introduction to hardware components of forced air systems: furnaces, direct exchange air conditioners, ductwork, terminal units
• Basic hydronic system schematic and principle of operation
• Introduction to hardware components of hydronic systems: boilers, chillers, air handling units (AHU), radiators
• Human comfort: selecting design parameters for indoor dry bulb temperature and relative humidity based upon ASHRAE Standard 55
• Determining outdoor design dry bulb temperatures and humidity using weather data
• Determining building ventilation requirements based upon ASHRAE Standard 62; the connection between ventilation and indoor air quality
• Complete psychrometric analysis of the air side of an HVAC system to establish physical properties and flowrates for the return air, ventilation air, mixture air, and supply air streams
• Calculation of heat transmission through the building envelope; locating U- and R-value data for various building components
• Infiltration through the building envelop, estimating sensible and latent infiltration using the crack method
• Calculating sensible and latent ventilation loads
• Estimating duct and pickup loads
• Calculating the total sensible and latent coil load for the heating load case
• Using the Cooling Load Temperature Difference (CLTD) model for determining the cooling coil load
• Overview of plumbing codes and standards
• Plumbing fixture types and terminology
• Water supply service line sizing procedure
• Building water distribution system sizing using the Uniform Pressure Loss Method
• Overview of waste and vent line layouts and code considerations
• Metrics of water chemistry; how to read a water quality report
• Potable water quality and the EPA Primary and Secondary Drinking Water Standards
• Grey water reuse and associated plumbing code restrictions
• Introduction to physical, chemical, and biological treatment techniques for water reuse
• Qualitative introduction to passive and active building fire protection systems: categories of passive and active fire protection devices; identify the main fire protection codes; roles of the architect and engineer in the design of the fire protection systems; NFPA introductory video
• Drivers for sustainability-environmental impact categories and how these are affected by building energy and water use
• The metric of embodied energy and how it can be used to design a more sustainable building mechanical system
• Life cycle assessment (LCA) as the gold standard for determining the most sustainable mechanical system design; focused case study using LCA to compare HVAC system alternatives
• The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) paradigm for promoting sustainable mechanical systems