The Architectural Engineering program at Vermont Technical College prepared us for a slew of potential careers. Although I hope to help make the high energy forms of HVAC that we use today somewhat obsolete, learning the science has been enlightening to say the least. Psychrometric charts have become a hobby and I look forward to buying my first infrared camera for energy auditing. 

Before having installed several heating and cooling appliances over the years, I was enthralled with the ideas of Viktor Schauberger, who observed that systems could be designed to enable the centripetal flow of fluids to create high energy systems with extremely low input. Since fluids take the shape of their container, designing the container in the shapes that fluids naturally flow has pronounced effects.

I would like to see his ideas enacted in a passive building system wherein the ducting itself does a significant portion of the work by virtue of fractal spiraling design, like we see in mammalian circulatory systems. Admittedly, the technology to do so is almost entirely unknown, but with 3D printing scaling up many things are possible.