Conceptual design of a coil selection module for a compartmented cooling coil - A user-centered approach

Abstract

A number of simulation tools and methods are available as designer-aid to enable the design of an energy efficient and healthy building. Despite the fact that such tools have increased in number, the usage of these tools is still limited. Performance evaluation of a cooling and dehumidifying coil is a key component of a typical system design and many of the existing tools have a crude coil selection model that allows the designer to approximately select the coil based on capacities, with a few limited coil selection curves in order to obtain the actual system side energy consumption and in turn the overall efficiency. This paper is an attempt to develop an algorithm for a comprehensive coil performance evaluation module which could be an add-on module for existing simulation tools based on the newly developed compartmented coil geometry. A user-centered evaluation of the existing coil selection modules is also presented.