Introba is an international building engineering and consulting firm with over 1000 employees in offices in Canada, the USA, the UK, and Australia. As a collection of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, sustainability analysis, energy modelers, policy researchers, and climate resilience planners, they collaborate with clients to create “Living Systems” that are smart, secure, resilient, and connected.

Introba’s work spans buildings in the Commercial, Education, Residential, Healthcare, Science & Technology, Government, and Cultural sectors. They bring green building technology to places for living, working, healing, and learning – including passive building design, heat pumps and heat recovery systems, advanced lighting, rainwater harvesting, renewable energy and storage systems, and building automation.

Passive Building Prototype 2024

In the Fall of 2024, WEST teamed up with Introba to create an exciting design challenge geared towards sustainable building practices and student-led innovation.

The focus of the Passive Building Prototype (PBP) project was to demonstrate how implementation of a passive building design can create spaces that are comfortable and safe for occupants, while minimizing the requirement for external inputs. The challenge was as follows:

As a representation of a small high-performance sustainable building, design and build a prototype enclosed structure that maintains the most stable indoor air temperature possible, using passive building design strategies.

Over the course of the semester, our participants designed and built prototype enclosed structures that met a given list of constraints. Once the prototypes were built, the final structures were exposed to real outdoor weather conditions with a temperature monitoring probe and data recording to evaluate their performance.

As a hands-on, industry-backed project, our participants gained valuable skills in:

Passive building design techniques
Teamwork and communication
Public speaking and networking
Tools training
CAD (computer-aided design)
Energy modeling
Contract administration and writing RFIs
Project management

Participants in the PBP project got to:

Tour a certified LEED Platinum building to see sustainable engineering in practice
Be mentored by industry leaders through all stages of design and building
Attend our Women In STEM panel event
Present their work at our end-of-term Project Showcase where we invite members of the community and industry professionals to celebrate each teams’ designs