Techno-economic Analysis of a Solar Desiccant-Evaporative Cooling System with Different Collector Types for Australian Office Buildings

By using building simulation program EnergyPlus, this paper evaluates the feasibility of adopting the solar desiccant-evaporative cooling (SDEC) system for a typical commercial building in all eight Australian capital cities, including Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney. Three different types of solar collector subsystem configurations for the proposed SDEC system are investigated, which are solar thermal (ST) collector, solar photovoltaic (PV) panel, and photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) collector. The technical and economic performances are analysed, including solar fraction (SF), system coefficient of performance (COP), annual site energy consumption, and life cycle cost (LCC). The simulation results show that for the proposed three SDEC systems, Darwin could achieve the highest yearly averaged SF and COP. The yearly SF in Darwin is 1.06 for the SDEC-PV system, 0.9 for SDEC-ST system, and 1.48 for SDEC-PVT system. The yearly system COP is 4.53 for SDEC-ST, 5.7 for SDEC-PV and 4.7 for SDEC-PVT respectively. It is also found that the SDEC-PVT system has the best system performance for Adelaide, Brisbane, Darwin, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, from both technical and economic points of view. For other two capital cities, the SDEC-PV system is the best option due to the lowest LCC.

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