Evaluation of evaporative cooling systems in industrial buildings

The cooling energy requirements are certainly a key issue in warm climates. Vapour compression refrigeration systems involve high energy consumptions and environmental emissions and that makes this kind of technology unattractive. These aspects are most relevant in buildings which have high volume and high internal thermal loads as happens often in industrial buildings. For this kind of buildings a sustainable alternative to improve indoor thermal conditions is represented by evaporative cooling systems. Such systems take advantage of the water evaporation process to cool an air stream, which could cool the supplied air or which could be itself the supplied air to the conditioned environment. In this paper a wide analysis of evaporative cooling applications is presented referring to a sample industrial building characterized by relevant thermal discomfort. The thermal behaviour of building has been evaluated using the transient simulation program TRNSYS, in which different study cases are implemented on varying the cooling system. Moreover, a kind of indirect evaporative cooling systems, called cyclic evaporative cooling, in which the air temperature can be reduced below the wet bulb temperature, has been designed. The results of the simulations were compared in terms of energy savings and thermal comfort.