Energy simulation of sustainable air-cooled chiller system for commercial buildings under climate change

Evaporative cooling technologies for air-cooled chillers for building energy performance improvement

“…A series of experimental and simulation studies by authors (Yang, Chan, Wu, Yang, & Zhang, 2012;Yang, Chan, Wu, Yu, & Yang, 2012;Yu & Chan, 2005, 2006, 2009Yu, Chan, Sit, & Yang, 2013;Yu, Chan, Yang, & Sit, 2015) have confirmed that mist precooling of condenser air brings benefits of energy savings and sustainable use of water, with regard to chillers operating in a warm and humid climate. The benefits would be more appealing for chillers operating in a hot-arid climate.…”

“…Figure 5 shows frequency polygons of the temperature depression for 8760 hourly data for the typical meteorological year of Hong Kong and the predicted weather scenarios in 2020, 2050 and 2080 under climate change. Details of generating future weather data are given in Yu, Chan, Sit, and Yang (2013). The percentage frequency tends to increase at higher temperature depressions in the future years, suggesting that energy savings by mist precooling would increase progressively throughout the functional life of a chiller system.…”

“…The significances of this study are to illustrate more design and operating criteria to nurture their applications, and to identify potential integration with optimal control of air-cooled chillers. This study is related to a series of research work by authors on the sustainable design and operation of air-cooled chiller systems and the simulation of improved energy performance of air-cooled chillers with mist precooling (Yang, Chan, Wu, Yu, & Yang, 2012;Yu & Chan, 2005, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008a, 2008b, 2009Yu, Chan, Sit, & Yang, 2013;Yu, Chan, Yang, & Sit, 2015). Vakiloroaya et al (2014) summarize two common devices placed in front of air-cooled condensers to cool evaporatively ambient air from the dry bulb temperature down to the wet bulb temperature.…”

“…Indeed, the designed water make up a rate of evaporative cooling towers is 0.0016 L/s per unit cooling capacity in kW (i.e. 3% of typical condenser water flow rate per unit cooling capacity) (Yu, Chan, Sit, & Yang, 2013).…”

Comparative study on the energy performance of chiller system in an institutional building with stochastic frontier analysis

“…The use of air-cooled chillers is common in medium to large scale buildings where using evaporative cooling towers is a concern for water conservation. Mist precooling of condenser air is not new but a practical technology to enhance the energy performance of air-cooled chillers with sustainable use of water [10][11][12]. Section 2 describes how the SFA was used to study chiller performance.…”