Three Yachay Tech students travelled to Antofagasta (Chile) to conduct their pre-professional practices from May 25 to June 25.

Luis Zhinin, Rafael Valencia and Ronny Cortez, Information Technology majors in their tenth, ninth and eighth semesters, respectively, joined the project “Optimization of the radiation permeability of trees to reduce the energy needs of buildings in arid climates”. This project works with solar energy to achieve urban sustainability. The internship was developed in the School of Architecture of Universidad Católica del Norte, and consisted of the optimization of simulations with energy on buildings.

The students worked with information collected from Antofagasta, Rome and Quito, which was used in a simulator that determines if a building receives sunlight or not, under the principle of binary system 0 and 1 used by computer equipment. They worked on this simulator’s structure, achieving greater precision in the data it delivered. This means that the simulator, which performed discrete calculations, throwing only two data (reception and non-reception of sunlight) began to make continuous calculations, allowing to obtain a range of data between the reception and non-reception of sunlight. The contribution of these simulations results in a more precise tool, in the optimization of economic resources and in the increase of planting of specific trees to have a sustainable urban model.

These practices were completed thanks to the previous internships that Luis and Rafael did at the National Institute for Electricity and Clean Energy (INEEL in Spanish), in Mexico. Their tutor in that country, impressed by the abilities of the students, gave good references of the Ecuadorian students in Chile.