New integrated hybrid evaporative cooling system for HVAC energy efficiency improvement

Cooling systems in buildings are required to be more energy-efficient while maintaining the standard air quality. The aim of this paper is to explore the potential of reducing the energy consumption of a central air-conditioned building taking into account comfort conditions. For this, we propose a new hybrid evaporative cooling system for HVAC efficiency improvement. The integrated system will be modeled and analyzed to accomplish the energy conservation and thermal comfort objectives. Comparisons of the proposed hybrid evaporative cooling approach with current technologies are included to show its advantages. To investigate the potential of energy savings and air quality, a real-world commercial building, located in a hot and dry climate region, together with its central cooling plant is used in the case study. The energy consumption and relevant data of the existing central cooling plant are acquired in a typical summer week. The performance with different cooling systems is simulated by using a transient simulation software package. New modules for the proposed system are developed by using collected experimental data and implemented with the transient tool. Results show that more than 52% power savings can be obtained by this system while maintaining the predicted mean vote (PMV) between -1 to +1 for most of summer time.