Twenty Virginia Tech students, four faculty from Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering and College of Architecture and Urban Studies, and the FutureHAUS Dubai modular smart home prototype are headed to the United Arab Emirates for the Solar Decathalon Middle East, held from Nov. 14th to Nov. 28th in Dubai.
The FutureHAUS Dubai team will be the only U.S.-based team of 14 university teams in the Solar Decathalon Middle East. The competition, launched by the United States Department of Energy and Dubai Electricity & Water Authority, is designed to produce and test sustainable, grid-connected solar homes in Dubai’s desert climate, as the city aims to have the world’s smallest carbon footprint by 2050.
In mid-September, the FutureHAUS Dubai home was shipped to Dubai by boat, a 7,286-mile trip that took 30 days to complete. Team members have been travelling to Dubai in waves since mid-October, some of them graduates who took time away from their new jobs to participate. The team is currently reassembling the entire house on-site, which will take two weeks before the competition starts.
The home and team will be judged in ten different contests over the course of the competition, including the efficiency of the home’s architecture and its ability to generate enough energy to perform everyday tasks.
“It feels surreal to finally be traveling to Dubai after dreaming about this day for two years,” says Laurie Booth, the student team lead of FutureHAUS Dubai. “We’ve got an extraordinary team and an extraordinary house. We’re counting down the minutes until the first day of competition.”
FutureHAUS Dubai is a hybridized modular and prefabricated home constructed from 18 prefabricated “cartridges”, each one equipped with integrated smart home technology. This allows for the home’s structure to be customized at any time. Each cartridge can be broken down into panels and reassembled elsewhere in as little as a day.
The project took two and a half years to complete, with students and faculty from across Virginia Tech’s colleges and schools assisting in its research and development. They include computer scientists, mechanical and systems engineers, and liberal arts and human sciences researchers, who provided insight on how inhabitants will interact with the home. Dozens of manufacturers have also used the FutureHAUS as an innovation lab for smart building technology, including Kohler, DuPont, Linak, and Glass Dynamics.
The home’s power electronics system, designed by The Center for Power Electronics Systems at Virginia Tech, uses an algorithmic process to ensure the home will always operate with a net-positive energy balance. Electrical and computer engineers from the College of Engineering designed the home’s electric systems and chose the most efficient smart technology and solar panel systems available to ensure the home’s sustainable operation.
FutureHAUS Dubai is the third modular home project led by Joe Wheeler, Virginia Tech architecture professor and co-director of the Center for Design Research in the School of Architecture + Design. The first, LumenHAUS, won the Solar Decathalon Europe in 2010. Wheeler and his team received a 2016 HIVE nomination for the second, FutureHAUS, which was exhibited at international trade shows before it was destroyed in a fire in 2017.
“The house design is a response to the need for a better way to build in the digital age,” Wheeler says. “As the need for smarter, more sustainable, and more affordable housing grows, we find that our efficient factory process will provide an ideal method for making future homes. The cartridges are sets of transportable, prefabricated ‘plug and play’ modules that can be arranged on site, making construction simpler, faster, and more efficient.”
