Design, Simulation, and Analysis of an Air-Conditioning System: A Case Study of the Proposed Aerospace Building of Pulchowk Engineering Campus in the Context of Nepal

Abstract

Optimization of energy consumption has been on the limelight from the beginning of this 21st century, with more than half of the energy being spent on controlling the indoor atmospheric conditions. Taking into account that the field of Heating, Ventilation, and Air-conditioning (HVAC) is in its preliminary developing stage in Nepal, researches associated with HVAC system optimization is only starting to germinate with detailed HVAC optimization studies being implied only in major HVAC projects. Commercially available software is available for that however, they only do so much in predicting the load not so much on how that load will affect the temperature distribution with respect to time and space. At such Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) can be a very effective tool in simulating the steady and unsteady temperature distributions. The present work focuses on design, simulation, and analysis of an air conditioning system best suited for the auditorium hall of the proposed Aerospace building of the Pulchowk Engineering Campus. Considering the fact, that the climate of Kathmandu is of subtropical type, the cooling loads were calculated for summer months from March to October via various methods implying Cooling Load Temperature Differences(CLTD), Hourly Analysis Program (HAP) and Autodesk Revit MEP. Consequently, the loads were estimated to be 9.87 Tons, 8.52 Tons, and 9.487 Tons respectively. Simulations were then performed in Fluent ANSYS for boundary conditions meeting the requirements of the weather data for 8, 9, 10 and 11 Tons of air-conditioning system setups which led to the conclusion that for desired design temperature of 21.5ºC, 10 Tons had the best performance in terms of the average of kWh used per hour for comfortable condition as well as the total energy consumed.