Integrated simulation of buildings and evaporative cooling systems

Abstract

Evaporative cooling can successfully be utilized for cooling indoor spaces in numerous areas in the world. These coolers are inexpensive, environmentally safe and energy efficient compared to conventional air-conditioners. To design the most efficient combination of a building and its evaporative cooling system an accessible and user-friendly design tool with short solution times is needed. Such a tool could not be found in existing literature. Available computer programs are either too complex or too simplified for successful design application. The lack of design tools can be ascribed to the difficulty in simplifying the simulation of the passive thermal performance of a building. A simplified but sufficiently accurate simulation procedure for passive buildings was recently developed and implemented in the computer program, EASY. This program provided a sound basis for the development of a design tool with the aid of which any type of evaporative cooler can be analysed. This includes regenerative systems coupled to any type of building. In this article it is shown how the analysis procedure for evaporative cooling systems was developed and coupled to the simplified building thermal simulation. The new tool is fast, easy to use and sufficiently accurate for design purposes. By utilizing this tool it was found that evaporative cooling systems can ensure thermal comfort in well-designed buildings in more than 80% of Southern Africa.