scholarly journals Apprehending Air Conditioning Systems in Context to COVID-19 and Human Health: A Brief Communication

Author(s):  
Shalom Akhai ◽  

Nowadays human race which is strongest of all creatures on the planet is frightened to move out without precautions because of coronavirus. In the current article, a brief overview of the use of air-conditioners available in different designs is addressed in context to COVID-19. Since this virus is often transmitted by exhalations from infected airways, so Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems may be important to enhance or mitigate the spread of the infection in indoor dwellings. The design of the building is directly related to the airflow through the structure of the building. One of the biggest problems that is mushrooming out of this crisis is the use of air-conditioners. The air-conditioners produce artificial built environment, which in some cases may not be good for human beings. But at home for attaining thermal comfort, it remains a question mark, whether building architecture using air-conditioner is safe or not. The paper herein tries to co-relate the literature available for providing a brief communication to these questions.

2018 ◽  
Vol 931 ◽  
pp. 920-925
Author(s):  
Zohrab Melikyan ◽  
Naira Egnatosyan ◽  
Siranush Egnatosyan

Centralized air conditioning systems are widely used in buildings at present. In these conditioners, the outside air gets required temperature, humidity, purity, and other features, necessary for creating comfort microclimate in inside areas of houses, and by the help of fans and air ducts the processed air moves to all rooms of a building. As a result, the creation and maintenance of comfort conditions in buildings become complicated and expensive activity. From this point of view, it is becoming more expedient to install local air conditioners in each room instead of single central one for the whole building. For this reason new local air conditioner is developed.


Author(s):  
Ahmed Almogbel ◽  
Fahad Alkasmoul ◽  
Zaid Aldawsari ◽  
Jaber Alsulami ◽  
Ahmed Alsuwailem

AbstractInterest for air-conditioning systems (ACs) has exponentially expanded worldwide throughout the most recent couple of decades. Countries with booming economies including Saudi Arabia report high growth of sales of room air conditioners. With the expanded (GDP) and warming climates, interest for room air-conditioning systems is required to additionally increment. Meeting the expanded need for electricity energy will be a challenge. Expanded utilization of energy-efficient air conditioners impactsly affects lowering the electricity demand. In an ordinary AC, the blower runs at a fixed speed and is either ON or OFF. In an inverter AC, the compressor is consistently on; however, power drawn relies upon the demand for cooling. The speed of the compressor is adjusted appropriately. In this paper, the energy consumption of non-inverter and an inverter AC of the same capacity was assessed in an average office room, under comparative operating conditions, to find the differences in the energy saving, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emission, and power consumption of air conditioner. Energy consumption was measured for about 108 days, which is from July 16th to October 31st, 24/7, and compared. The experiment is conducted with the same conditions and same capacity air conditioners (18,000 BTU). Results show that the day-by-day normal vitality utilization, the inverter will save up to 44% of electrical consumption compared to a non-inverter of 3471 kWh/year and 6230 kWh/year respectively. Furthermore, the Total Equivalent Warming Impact (TEWI) analysis shows that inverters can save 49% of CO2 emissions.


Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 1696
Author(s):  
Lubna Siam ◽  
Issam A. Al-Khatib ◽  
Fathi Anayah ◽  
Shehdeh Jodeh ◽  
Ghadir Hanbali ◽  
...  

As the need for water is increasing in Palestine, and the available water resources are barely sufficient to meet the demands of the current quality of life and the economy, air conditioner condensate water could be explored as an alternative water source. The objective of this study is to better understand the potential for recovery of condensate water from air conditioning systems in two Palestinian cities. In addition, this study aims to evaluate this water source in terms of quality and quantity. Generally, it was found that the condensate water has good quality, which conforms to the Palestinian standards for reused water for irrigation, except for turbidity, biological oxygen demand (BOD) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) measurements. Reflecting the heavy metal occurrence in the collected condensate water, no particular risk was recognized for drinking water or reused irrigation standards, except for manganese occurrence of 0.19 mg/L in one sample. From a single unit capacity, high quantities of water were observed of approximately 259 L and 453 L per month in Ramallah and Jericho cities, respectively. These figures should draw the attention of decision and policy makers to put in place strict technical guidelines to be followed for potential reuse of condensate water at the local level.


Author(s):  
Wufeng Jin ◽  
Cheng Wang ◽  
Yuebo Jiang ◽  
Liyue Ren ◽  
Bongsoo Choi ◽  
...  

In residential air conditioning systems, outdoor units are often installed in the recesses of building facades and shaded by louvres; however, different unit installation positions and louvre blade angles affect the thermal environment around the outdoor unit and the energy efficiency ratio (EER) of the air conditioner. In this study, the effects of the outdoor unit installation position and louvre blade angle on the EER when a single outdoor unit was installed in a recess were investigated by experiments on a 1.5 hp air conditioner (rated power of the air conditioner is 3.5 kW), and the influence of the spacing and angle between two outdoor units on the air conditioner EER when two outdoor units were installed in the same recess was explored. The results of the research indicate that when a single outdoor unit is installed in the recess, the EER increases with an increase in the distance between the inlet of the outdoor unit and the wall. To meet the three-level standard of air conditioner EERs, the distance between the inlet and wall needs to be greater than 300 mm. The EER first increased and then decreased slowly with the increase in the distance between the outdoor unit outlet and louvre; thus, the distance between the outlet and louvre should not be less than 300 mm. The EER first increased and then decreased with the increase in the blade angle, and thus, the blade angle should not be greater than 20°. When two outdoor units are installed in the same recess, each installation mode, “horizontal installation” (same height and collinear), “perpendicular installation” (same height and perpendicular), “angle installation” (same height and obtuse angle), and “up and down parallel installation” (different heights and parallel), has an optimum installation distance and angle.


The work is aimed to replace conventional refrigerants used in air cooling system with Air Cycle Machine (ACM). Commercial Air-conditioners uses the refrigerants (Freon-Gas cycle) to remove the indoor air from the room. Freon leakage causes health problems such as respiratory ailments, heart attack and circulatory collapse. Air conditioning systems made based on desiccants. Refrigerant poisoning results in Throat swelling, loss of vision, blood vomiting, blood in the stool, severe abdominal pain and even death is possible. This can be overcome by using air cycle cooling process instead of Freon as a phase changing material. Air Cycle Machine is the system used in aircraft cabin pressurization and cooling system which does not uses refrigerants in the cooling process. The analytical work carried out in this paper is to study the air conditioning system using Air Cycle Machine and investigate the air flow inside the room by giving the various inlet temperatures and the inlet velocity of the Air-conditioner. ANSYS-FLUENT 16.0 is used for the analytical study. A cabin enclosure was modeled and analyzed for different inlet temperatures and velocities and out coming cool air spread nature for the given conditions have been observed. The qualitative results of this study clearly evident the usage of Air Cycle Machine (ACM) is prominently reduces the room temperature than the refrigerant system and spreads the cool air throughout the enclosed room makes a comfortable environment and this would not leads to any health hazards. Thus this study is certain to use Air Cycle Machine (ACM) for the cabin cooling system rather than refrigerants.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (15) ◽  
pp. 4663
Author(s):  
Tatsuhiro Yamamoto ◽  
Akihito Ozaki ◽  
Myonghyang Lee

The number of houses with large, continuous spaces has increased recently. With improvements in insulation performance, it has become possible to efficiently air condition such spaces using a single air conditioner. However, the air conditioning efficiency depends on the placement of the air conditioner. The only way to determine the optimal placement of such air conditioners is to conduct an experiment or use computational fluid dynamic analysis. However, because the analysis is performed over a limited period, it is difficult to consider non-stationarity effects without using an energy simulation. Therefore, in this study, energy simulations and computational fluid dynamics analyses were coupled to develop a thermal environment analysis method that considers non-stationarity effects, and various air conditioner arrangements were investigated to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method. The accuracy verification results generally followed the experimental results. A case study was conducted using the calculated boundary conditions, and the results showed that the placement of two air conditioners in the target experimental house could provide sufficient air conditioning during both winter and summer. Our results suggest that this method can be used to conduct preliminary studies if the necessary data are available during design or if an experimental house is used.


2017 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos R. de Nardin ◽  
Felipe T. Fernandes ◽  
Adriano J. Longo ◽  
Luciano P. Lima ◽  
Felix A. Farret ◽  
...  

This paper presents a comparison of air conditioners using the conventional heating, ventilation, and air conditioning heat pumps and the one using solar heat stored underground, also known as shallow geothermal air conditioning. The proposed air conditioner with solar heat stored underground reunites practical data from an implementation of the heuristic perturb-and-observe (P&O) control and a heat management technique. The aim is to find out the best possible heat exchange between the room ambient and the underground soil heat to reduce its overall consumption without any heat pump. Comparative tests were conducted in two similar rooms, each one equipped with one of the two types of air conditioning. The room temperature with the conventional air conditioning was maintained as close as possible to the temperature of the test room with shallow geothermal conditioning to allow an acceptable data validation. The experiments made both in the winter of 2014 and in the summer of 2015 in Santa Maria, South Brazil, demonstrated that the conventional air conditioner consumed 19.08 kWh and the shallow geothermal conditioner (SGC) consumed only 4.65 kWh, therefore, representing a reduction of energy consumption of approximately 75%.


Author(s):  
Ali Al-Alili ◽  
Yunho Hwang ◽  
Reinhard Radermacher

In hot and humid regions, removal of moisture from the air represents a considerable portion of the air conditioning load. Conventionally, air conditioning systems have to lower the air temperature below its dew point to accomplish dehumidification. Desiccant air conditioners offer a solution to meet the humidity and temperature requirements of buildings via decoupling latent and sensible loads. In this work, the performance of a new desiccant material is investigated experimentally. This desiccant material can be regenerated using a low temperature heat source, as low as 45°C. It also has a unique S-shape isotherm. The effects of the process air stream’s temperature and humidity, the regeneration temperature, the ventilation mass flow rate, and the desiccant wheel’s rotational speed on the cycle performance are investigated. ARI-humid conditions are used as a baseline and the moisture mass balance is maintained within 5%. The results are presented in terms of the moisture removal rate and latent coefficient of performance (COPlat). The results show a desiccant wheel’s COPlat higher than unity when it is coupled with an enthalpy wheel.


2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 560-575
Author(s):  
Jehanzeb Ahmad ◽  
M Najam Ul Islam ◽  
Jawwad Sabir

The benefits of thermal energy storage using phase change materials are well documented in the literature. Despite all the potential benefits of thermal energy storage, its commercial and widespread application remains limited. This is due to the high initial cost of phase change materials, extensive rework required in buildings, major modifications in HVAC systems, and the potential for leakage, fire and toxicity hazards. There is a strong need for a simple thermal energy storage solution which can be adopted by large number of consumers. Ductless split air-conditioners are portable, low cost, efficient and account for 70% of all air-conditioning systems sold worldwide each year. The present research provides a novel and low cost solution that incorporates thermal energy storage in these air conditioners, allowing them to run without electricity for 3 h. The paper deals with the detailed design aspects and engineering challenges that arise when incorporating thermal energy storage in these small units. A prototype air-conditioner with in-built thermal energy storage was developed, and all performance parameters presented have been validated through data obtained from the prototype. Our results indicate that thermal energy storage can be incorporated in split units in low cost and with minimal drop in overall energy efficiency of the system. Practical application: Incorporating thermal energy storage in split air-conditioners which enables them to run without grid for many hours has immense practical applications. Since around 50% power in any building is consumed by HVAC systems, being able to provide cooling during peak hours without using grid can significantly reduce load on the grid without compromising user comfort. For developing countries where load shedding is frequent, the users can run these air-conditioners without the use of generators or batteries thus saving costs and the environment.


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