LIFE CYCLE COSTING OF HYBRID COOLING SYSTEMS

Abstract

As one of the increasingly prevalent issues faced by the world today, climate change has brought about numerous negative impacts like resource scarcity and global warming across countries over the years. Various technologies have been developed and adopted in different settings to mitigate environmental issues, especially regarding more efficient resource usage from cooling consumption. One such emerging technology for air conditioning adopted in Singapore is the hybrid cooling system (HCS). The HCS was designed to reduce overall electricity consumption and carbon footprint through lower water and energy usage, while maintaining adequate levels of thermal comfort for users. Despite the environmental benefits, there is uncertainty as to whether the HCS is economically sustainable. This paper sets out to investigate the life cycle costing (LCC) of HCS and presents comparative findings on how HCS can serve as better alternatives to convention cooling systems (CCS) in terms of economic and environmental aspects. The case study adopted will be based on three different cooling systems from SDE 4 Net Zero building, namely the HCS at level 5, the HCS at level 6 and the CCS at level 5. The costs data were obtained from level 5 and level 6 energy consumption of the building and through research, which was then used to compute the LCC analysis results for the three cooling systems. The results were then assessed and evaluated via T-tests to identify any significant differences in the LCC between HCS and CCS. The overall LCC analysis findings proposed that HCS can serve as a more cost-effective option as compared to CCS in the long run.