International News
efficiency of SWAC projects with long pipelines , while allowing for expansion to meet growing cooling demand . The proposal involves increasing the excavation depth of the seawater pump station , which allows an increase in the velocity and flow rate of the seawater inlet pipeline .
“ We call this approach ‘ High Velocity Seawater Airconditioning ’. This design configuration allows such projects to be built with an initial cooling load and expand the cooling load modularly through smaller additional capital costs ,” explains study lead author Julian Hunt , who did this research during his postdoc at IIASA .
Other advantages of SWAC includes its reliability as a non-intermittent renewable source of cooling , reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from cooling processes , and the reduction of water consumption in cooling systems . In addition , it could serve as a cheap alternative for large-scale cooling in tropical countries where it could reduce the costs of food and grain storage , thus helping to lower the vulnerability of developing countries to climate change . Given the recent interest in hydrogen production and hydrogen-based economies , SWAC could even be combined with hydrogen liquefaction plants where it could help to reduce energy consumption in the process to liquefy hydrogen by up to 10 %.
The researchers however caution that despite its potential and many advantages , this technology also has challenges . The return of the seawater should , for instance , be handled with extreme care to minimise its impact on coastal wildlife ; retrofitting district cooling infrastructure and buildings could incur high capital costs ; and there is a risk of thermal shock and increased nutrient loading in the deep seawater outlet .
“ While it does have its challenges , seawater airconditioning is an innovative and sustainable technology that has great potential for expanding into a benchmark system for cooling in tropical locations close to the deep sea and will help fulfill our cooling needs in a warming world ,” Hunt concludes .
RACA
REFERENCE :
1 . Hunt J , Zakeri B , Nascimento A , Garnier B , Pereira M , Bellezoni R , de Assis Brasil Weber N , Smith Schneider P , et al . ( 2020 ). High velocity seawater air-conditioning with thermal energy storage and its operation with intermittent renewable energies . Energy Efficiency DOI .
14
RACA Journal I January 2021 www . hvacronline . co . za