Investigation of heat load calculation for air carrying energy radiant air-conditioning system

Abstract

Radiant heating and cooling has been widely acknowledged as an important energy-saving technique for building air-conditioning. This paper put forward the concept of Air Carrying Energy Radiant-air-conditioning System (ACERS) to solve some of the limitations of existing radiant air-conditioning systems. Since the orifice plate of ACERS would enable radiant and convective heat transfer with indoor surfaces, using the traditional load calculation method could result in inaccuracy. Therefore, a correction coefficient method for load calculation for ACERS was developed. Based on experiments conducted in summer and winter, in a room installed with ACERS, the cooling and heating loads of the test room were calculated by traditional and newly developed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation method. Then the cooling and heating load calculation results of two methods were compared as the approximate correction coefficient of ACERS, which was validated as about 0.75 in summer cooling and 0.8 in winter heating. Furthermore, the components of air-conditioning load calculation are unrelated with room type, so this simplified load calculation method can be extended to other rooms with ACERS. The load calculation is the foundation of ACERS design and application, and should also contribute to energy conservation in usage of Heating, Ventilating, Air-conditioning (HVAC).