PGE students win the 2021 PAROI Challenge

The wall challenge: a project that is as interesting from a technical standpoint as it is from an educational one! 

This challenge, based on discovering and experimenting with different building techniques, is also unique in that it brings together participants with different levels of training.
Engineering students in PGE classes, high school students, and IUT students compete against each other with the same goal in mind. The challenge is to design and build a wall element for housing that meets thermal performance requirements as well as the key environmental challenges of 2021: material sustainability and low environmental impact.
The teams present their creations and defend their technical choices before building professionals, architects, design offices, and companies, who are tasked with selecting the most successful projects.

1 prize and 3 videos

Antoine Chaussalet, Corentin Sandoz, Tanguy Soulard, and Théophile Venaille are second-year students in the Grande Ecole Program at the Arts et Métiers campus Arts et Métiers Cluny.

For this project, they focused on the local dimension and encouraged the collection of corks and surgical masks on the Cluny campus and in student residences. The aim was to extract the polypropylene and use it as a binder in their recycled textile fiber insulation. This insulation comes directly from the Cluny and Mâcon resource centers.

We used about 15 pairs of jeans and 15% polyester by weight from recycled surgical masks to fill our wall. We covered the interior surface with 50 corks.

Alongside their wall prototype, they ran the Challenge website and produced three videos on thermal conductivity.

Measuring thermal diffusivity using the hot plate method - Overview

Measurement of thermal diffusivity using the hot plate method - Interface and parameters

 Measurement of thermal diffusivity using the hot plate method - performing a measurement