Comparative Study Between Air-Cooled and Water-Cooled Condensers of the Air-Conditioning Systems

Abstract

The weather in Kuwait is very dry where the dry-bulb temperature exceeds the wet-bulb temperature more than 20oC in most of the summer months. Thus, the air-conditioning (A/C) system with the water-cooled (WC) condensers is expected to perform more efficiently than with the air-cooled (AC) condensers. This fact was behind the idea of a field study conducted in one of the major hospital in Kuwait during a summer season to investigate the performance of WC and AC systems in terms of peak power and energy consumptions. The cooling capacities for WC and AC systems were 373 and 278 tons-of- refrigeration, respectively. It was found that for the same cooling production, the peak power demand and the daily energy consumption of the WC system were 45 and 32% less than that of the AC system, respectively. The maximum reduction in the power demand coincided with the peak power demand period of the utilities i.e. between 14:00 and 17:00 hr, thereby offering a maximum advantage of peak power saving.