Abstract
Radiant cooling system (RCS) has proven to be an energy efficient system for meeting a building's cooling requirements. RCS is energy efficient and provides better thermal comfort compared to conventional all-air heating ventilation air conditioning (HVAC) system. To further improve the efficiency of RCS, a parallel evaporative cooling system (cooling tower) is coupled with RCS and analyzed for different climatic condition using calibrated model. A statistical analysis of weather files (based on wet bulb temperature), was used to identify the availability of useful water for cooling tower integration with RCS. A comprehensive simulation feasibility study of the application of cooling tower in RCS was performed for different cities to cover every climatic zones of India. It was found that in summer, the wet bulb temperature (WBT) of different climatic zones, except warm-humid, is suitable for the integration of cooling tower with RCS. An experimental setup was designed and developed for integration of parallel chiller and cooling tower with panel-based RCS for cooling and a dedicated outdoor air system (DOAS) for dehumidification and ventilation. Experiments were conducted for chiller and cooling tower operated RCS in Composite climate of Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. Building Energy Models (BEM) were developed for both the chiller-operated RCS and cooling tower-operated RCS in EnergyPlus and calibrated with the measured data. Using the calibrated models, performance of the system was analyzed for different climatic zones of India. A chiller-operated RCS was considered as a baseline to compare the annual energy saving potential and monthly performance of the cooling tower integrated RCS. In the cooling tower–operated RCS, a total annual savings of 7% in hot and dry climates, 11% in composite climates and 20% in temperate climates was achieved compared to the chiller-operated RCS.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 561-572 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Journal of Building Engineering |
| Volume | 19 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Sep 2018 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
Funding
Notice: This manuscript has been co-authored by UT-Battelle, LLC under Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan ). We acknowledge the financial support provided by the Department of Science and Technology, the Government of India , and the US Department of Energy under the US–India Centre for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD) project . We acknowledge the financial support provided by IUSSTF (Indo-US Science and Technology Forum), New Delhi, India to BHAVAN Fellow Prateek Srivastava to pursue an internship at ORNL, USA. The authors also acknowledge Mr. Guruprakash Sastry, Regional Manager of Infrastructure & Green Initiatives at INFOSYS, Bangalore (India) for providing metered energy use data and for supporting the study.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| CBERD | |
| US–India Centre for Building Energy Research and Development | |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Oak Ridge National Laboratory | |
| UT-Battelle | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| Department of Science and Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, India | |
| Indo-US Science and Technology Forum |
