On 16 June, the Campus Feuchtwangen welcomed twelve interested employees from the neighbouring Bayerische BauAkademie. Laboratory engineer Oliver Abel first led the group through the innovative research building and explained its special technical features: “The building is an Efficiency House Plus educational building – i.e. the photovoltaic system mounted on the roof generates more energy than we consume annually. The walls are built in a combined timber post and timber frame construction. The exterior facade is made of untreated native Douglas fir wood and is fully ventilated.”

“With the help of a heat pump and the energy fence in front of the building, ambient heat as well as solar energy input from the sun can be used for heating. The latent heat of the ice storage tank embedded in the ground with a volume of 273m³ serves as a further heat source in winter and, conversely, can also be used to cool the building in summer,” Abel continued.

Afterwards, the head of the campus Prof. Johannes Jungwirth informed about the current teaching and research focuses. In addition to the two courses of study “Sustainable Engineering – Energy and Building Technology” and “Smart Energy Systems”, which are based at the Campus, the projects for the decarbonisation of Feuchtwangen and the planned test room at the Campus for measuring comfort with different heating and ventilation concepts were also presented, among other things.

“We want to show students here that you sometimes have to act outside of standards and, above all, across disciplines to achieve the best possible results” says Christoph Matschi, PhD student and research assistant, referring to the only very limited definition of comfort from the 1960s. “When it comes to building services engineering, the quality of education at Campus Feuchtwangen is in no way inferior to institutes in Munich or Berlin, for example.”

The final presentation of the interdisciplinary Bavarian Drone Academy of the Ansbach University of Applied Sciences by the business manager Dr. Gernot Vogt generated a lot of interest on the part of the visitors. “In addition to the media sector, which particularly appreciates the spectacular image and video recording, drones also open up completely new perspectives in the field of technology, for example in connection with thermography.” The campus’s own photovoltaic system was inspected live on site, for example, to identify conspicuously hot and thus defective cells.

Gabriela Gottwald, the head of the BauAkademie, was enthusiastic and promised as a parting gift: “The next meeting will take place at our place, then you can dare to take the wheel of our construction machines.