The Greater Binghamton Airport (GBA) will break ground next spring on a contest-winning project designed by Binghamton University engineering students.

The Southern Tier Economic Partnership, an organization that funds projects in the Southern Tier, has been awarded a $374,000 grant to pay for the first phase of a project at GBA that would help clear snow from GBA’s tarmac.

The project, which revolves around using geothermal heat to protect airports from ice and snow, began as a computer science competition through the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

The 2009 FAA Design Competition, which involved more than 50 universities across the nation, asked teams to choose a problem from a list provided by the FAA and provide a feasible solution in a 70-page paper.

Associate Professor William Ziegler led the team of 26 students in 2009.

According to Ziegler, airports can’t use sidewalk salt to remove ice and snow because it would end up rusting the planes.

‘We realized that the runways may be too big to heat, but we thought that we could keep the snow off of the apron,’ Ziegler said.

The apron is the area of the airport where planes are parked.

The FAA is interested in anything to do with airports for the competition, more than the planes themselves, and one of the suggestions from their list had to do with removing ice and snow from runways, Ziegler said.

After meeting with the local engineering firm McFarland-Johnson and brainstorming ideas, the group decided on heating the runways by using geothermal heating, a technique which draws out heat from the ground.

The current project at GBA will involve heating a section of the apron using a radiant geothermal heating prototype.

According to Ziegler, GBA had been planning to do work on their apron and the timing worked out well.

The grant will be used to fund the first phase of the $1.4 million project.

Giovanni Torres, a 2009 computer science graduate, was one of the leaders of the group of students.

‘When we first went to the class, Professor Ziegler had done a lot of research and narrowed down ideas of what we could do, and so we all voted on which idea we thought would be best,’ Torres said. ‘The idea we came up with had already been in development, but we wanted to figure out how to apply it to an area like Binghamton that gets serious snow.’

Since most of the students have graduated, a team of new students will be monitoring all of the equipment with Ziegler. They are documenting every step with text and pictures for the FAA.

BU engineering students have entered this competition two years in a row, and are preparing for a third year. According to Ziegler, BU had two first-place teams in 2009 and a first-place team and a runner-up team in 2010.

The project will be complete by summer 2011.