Abstract
Efficient air-cooling systems for hot climatic conditions, such as Southern Europe, are required in the context of nearly Zero Energy Buildings, nZEB. Innovative air-cooling systems such as regenerative indirect evaporative coolers, RIEC and desiccant regenerative indirect evaporative coolers, DRIEC, can be considered an interesting alternative to direct expansion air-cooling systems, DX. The main aim of the present work was to evaluate the seasonal performance of three air-cooling systems in terms of air quality, thermal comfort and energy consumption in a standard classroom. Several annual energy simulations were carried out to evaluate these indexes for four different climate zones in the Mediterranean area. The simulations were carried out with empirically validated models. The results showed that DRIEC and DX improved by 29.8% and 14.6% over RIEC regarding thermal comfort, for the warmest climatic conditions, Lampedusa and Seville. However, DX showed an energy consumption three and four times higher than DRIEC for these climatic conditions, respectively. RIEC provided the highest percentage of hours with favorable indoor air quality for all climate zones, between 46.3% and 67.5%. Therefore, the air-cooling systems DRIEC and RIEC have a significant potential to reduce energy consumption, achieving the user’s thermal comfort and improving indoor air quality.
Highlights
Published: 22 July 2021According to the Energy Performance of Building Directive, sustainable development and the achievement of competitive HVAC systems were established as main objectives [1].The final energy consumption in buildings accounts for 40% of the total energy consumption in Europe, as well as 36% of the total CO2 emissions [2]
(i)aaconventional conventional air-cooling system based on a direct expansion unit (DX); (ii) an air-cooling system based air-cooling system based on a direct expansion unit (DX); (ii) an air-cooling system based on a regenerative indirect evaporative cooler (RIEC); and (iii) a desiccant regenerative on a regenerative indirect evaporative cooler (RIEC); and (iii) a desiccant regenerative inindirect evaporative cooler (DRIEC)
Influence of climatic severity in the thermal comfort, air quality andand energy consumption criteria were studied severity in the thermal comfort, air quality energy consumption criteria were studied to understand the annual results in each climate zone
Summary
Published: 22 July 2021According to the Energy Performance of Building Directive, sustainable development and the achievement of competitive HVAC systems were established as main objectives [1].The final energy consumption in buildings accounts for 40% of the total energy consumption in Europe, as well as 36% of the total CO2 emissions [2]. According to the Energy Performance of Building Directive, sustainable development and the achievement of competitive HVAC systems were established as main objectives [1]. The development of innovative air-cooling systems is required. Previous research studies analyzed the behavior of different heating, ventilation and air-conditioning, HVAC, systems [4,5]. All outside air-cooling systems require further research and development, regarding thermal comfort, air quality and energy efficiency [4]. Several works on HVAC systems were carried out in order to optimize operational parameters, control parameters and design parameters [5]. The thermal comfort was evaluated, either indicated by the indoor air quality (IAQ) or the Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations
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