Practical Solar Thermal Chilled Water

Abstract

With the pressing need for the United States to reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels, it has become a national priority to develop technologies that allow practical use of renewable energy sources. One such energy source is sunlight. It has the potential to impact America's use of non-renewable energy beyond its own design capacity by applying it to the optimization of an existing building's system. Solar-thermal chilling systems are not new. However, few of them can be described as a practical success. The primary reason for these disappointments is a misunderstanding of solar energy dynamics by air conditioning designers; combined with a similar misunderstanding by solar engineers of how thermally driven chillers react to the loads and energy sources applied to them. With this in mind, a modeling tool has been developed which provides the flexibility to apply a strategy which can be termed, Optimization by Design.