Page 32 - Climate Control News December 2018

Cooling Towers
System ready for real world applications
CU BOULDER AND University of Wyoming engineers have successfully scaled up an innova- tive water-cooling system capable of providing continuous day-and-night radiative cooling for a range of structures from family homes to power plants and data centres.
The new research demonstrates how the low- cost hybrid organic-inorganic radiative cooling metamaterial, which debuted in 2017, can be scaled into a roughly 140-square-foot array— small enough to fit on most rooftops—and act as a kind of natural air conditioner with almost no consumption of electricity.
“THE MODULE PERFORMS IN REAL-WORLD SITUATIONS.” – ENGINEER & LEAD AUTHOR, PROFESSOR RONGGUI YANG.
“You could place these panels on the roof of a single-family home and satisfy its cooling re- quirements,” according to Dongliang Zhao, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral re- searcher in CU Boulder’s Department of Me- chanical Engineering.
The technology takes advantage of natural radiative cooling principles.
Professor Ronggui Yang of mechanical engi- neering and lead author of the study, said as Earth's temperature warms due to the absorbed heat from the sunlight during the day, it continuously emits infrared light to the cold universe all the time.
“During the night, Earth cools down due to the emission without the sunshine,” he said.
The researchers’ film-like material reflects al- most all incoming sunlight while still allowing an object’s stored heat to escape as much as possible, keeping it cooler than ambient air even in the mid- day sun.
The material can now be produced at low cost using the current roll-to-roll manufacturing technique, offering a long list of advantages.
“We can now apply these materials on build- ing roof tops, and even build large-scale water cooling systems with significant advantages over conventional air conditioning systems, which require high amounts of electricity to function,” Associate Professor Gang Tan of the University of Wyoming’s Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering said.
The researchers tested their system outdoors in a variety of weather conditions, including wind, precipitation and humidity.
The researchers also introduced an element
The radiative cooling metamaterial can be scaled into a 140-square-foot array that can fit on most rooftops.
of dynamic scheduling to their technology, an- ticipating that structures such as offices may have limited or no cooling demand at night.
In a building-integrated system, however, a cold storage unit could be added to capture the cold through heat transfer fluid such as water in this system and allow it to be retrieved during the subsequent day to reduce the cooling strain during peak demand periods.
“We have built a module that performs in real- world, practical situations,” Yang said.
“We have moved quite far and fast from a ma- terials level to a system level.”
The RadiCold module could become a viable solution for supplemental cooling for data cen- tres, businesses and power plants, among other potential applications, Yang said. ✺
WETEX 2018 was held at the Dubai International Convention & Exhibition Centre.
World’s first AI-powered district cooling plant
DISTRICT COOLING FIRM Emirates Central Cooling Systems Corporation (Empower) has in- troduced the world’s first unmanned district cooling plant that uses Artificial Intelligence, at the recent 20th Water, Energy, Technology and Environment Exhibition (WETEX) 2018.
The 50,000 Refrigeration Tons (RT) cooling plant is set to be completed in Jumeirah Vil- lage Area.
Ahmad Bin Shafar, CEO of Empower, said the plant uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to monitor and automatically adjust inflow and outflow of the chilled water, with 0.89 kW/t op- erational efficiency, using six water coolers (11KV) to monitor and adjust the flow of water to and from the cooling station, as well as ad- vanced SCADA system with the capacity to read 2 million data related to cooling towers,
chillers, transformers and water supply. It also uses award-winning TSE and Thermal Energy Storage (TES) technologies to serve chilled water to 90 buildings through ETS Rooms
located in each building, the company stated. The plant is set to be completed late 2019. WETEX 2018 was held in late October 2018
at Dubai International Convention and Exhi- bition Centre. ✺
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