Engineering Education "Today in History" Blog: Solar Heating and Radiation Cooling
by Alice Agogino
closeAuthor: Alice Agogino
Name: Alice Agogino
Email: agogino@berkeley.edu
Site: http://www.me.berkeley.edu/faculty/agogino/
About: Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and is affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. Her research interests include: community-based design; sustainable engineering; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS/NEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity.
She has served in a number of administrative positions at UC Berkeley, including Chair of the Faculty Senate, Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. Prof. Agogino also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as PI for the NEEDS (www.needs.org) and SMETE.ORG digital libraries of courseware in science, mathematics, engineering and technology.
Prof. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she worked in industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric and SRI International. She has authored over 150 scholarly publications; has won numerous teaching, best paper and research awards; and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). At NAE she served on the Committee on Engineering Education, working on the Technologically Speaking and the Engineer 2020 projects. She is currently a member of the National Research Council's Board on Education and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee. She has supervised 66 MS projects/theses, 26 doctoral dissertations and numerous undergraduate researchers.See Authors Posts (122) · January 15th, 2008 · Add a Comment
Today in History – January 15, 1955 – first solar-heated and radiation-cooled house in the United States. Respect for the powers of the sun has been a critical part of building design since humans first built shelters for protection from the environment. I grew up in the American Southwest and recall that adobe buildings were designed to cool in the summer and retain heat in the winter through appropriate use of thermal mass, windows and passive air circulation systems. Solar water heating was used in Florida, California, and the Southwest as early as the 1920s but never took off as a viable commercial industry.
Raymond W. Bliss (6 Oct 1915 - 7 Nov 2004) is credited with building the first integrated solar heating and radiation cooling house in Tucson, Arizona in 1955. Built at a cost of approxiamately $4,000 for labor and materials, the house used a large slanted slab of steel and glass that captured heat from the sun, which was ducted into the house. Summer cooling used the same ducts and associated fans and controls.
For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on solar energy, green and sustainable building design and architectural engineering. Curricular resources can be found on the Architectural Engineering Education Community site.
Tags: Architectural Engineering · Civil Engineering · General Engineering, Engineering Science · Mechanical Engineering
