Evaluating the low exergy of chilled water in a radiant cooling system

In this paper, in order to make guidelines for designing a low-energy radiant cooling system with an air-handling unit (AHU) for dehumidification, we investigated the impact of various air-conditioning parameters on the exergies of chilled water supplied to radiant panels and a cooling coil. The cooling load, thermal comfort index PMV, relative humidity, area of radiant panels, sensible heat factor (SHF), temperature and air-flow rate of supply air of the AHU, and presence/absence of total heat exchanger were considered. We used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code in order to analyze the indoor air-flow and thermal environments, and added models for the calculation of thermal transfer to radiant panels and a cooling coil. Furthermore, a feedback control algorithm was introduced to calculate the surface radiant panel temperature, targeting the average PMV of the task area in an office room. As a result, the impact of various air-conditioning parameters on the exergies of chilled water were demonstrated quantitatively. As an example, by reducing the cooling load rate from 100% to 57% and 27%, the exergy of chilled water decreased by 47% and 67%, respectively.