PROJECT TITLE: Close the Hood Competition
- PROJECT MEMBERS: ANNE G
- GOAL OF INTERACTIVE VISUALIZATION: Bring or Maintain awareness to the cost of fume hoods and motivate people to conserve energy.
A fume hood is a piece of equipment common to chemistry laboratories designed to limit a person's exposure to hazardous and/or unpleasant fumes.
1. The larger the fume hood opening, the larger the volume of air circulating through the hood, and since most of this air comes from outside the building and must be heated and cooled, the higher the amount of energy used.
2. If the fume hood is not in use, keeping the sash wide open WASTES about $1,500 in energy costs per year per hood.
In the HMS 2005 awareness campaign, the average sash opening in the five participating HMS buildings dropped from 12 inches to 2 inches. This campaign alone saved HMS over $100,000 in energy costs per year and prevented nearly 1.2 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions.
- WEB INSPIRATION:
The Oberlin Campus monitoring system - MOTIVATING QUESTIONS: KEY INFORMATION TO CONVEY:
The visualization needs to bring to the students the information they need to understand their CFM usage and reduce it.
- Average daily lab CFM use in current competition period compared to goal set for lab
- night CFM use
- lunch break pattern of CFM use
- historical data to view changes over time
- DESIGN AND INTERACTION METHODS:
I have chosen a design with three independent graphs. Each graph displays an aspect of the data which is important to answer the questions. The first graph looks at the daily CFM use compared to goal set for each lab. The second graph looks at the night CFM use and its departure from the wished for minimum. The third graph lets the user look at the data day by day, to see patterns and changes in patterns. By plotting a fixed average over last 30 week days, the user can quickly see if the night data is changing when changing the date, or whether the lunch break represents a lull in CFM use.
- RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS
There is no single answer. Some labs are larger than others and therefore show a different pattern. It does appear that most labs can still improve into closing the Hoods at night more conscientiously. Some labs appear to have improved over the past months, to be reliable at night and have a clear break pattern at lunch time. Other labs do not show this pattern and a discussion in view of this data might bring up more information as to the reason for the difference in pattern.
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Source code: final_project3 CFMdata FloatTable Integrator PlotBarChart PlotDay PlotTimeSeries PlotTitle RankedList SummaryTable
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