Application of Water-Cooled Air-Conditioning for High-Rise Residential Buildings

To improve the applicability of water-cooled air-conditioners in the domestic sector, the development of a prediction model for energy performance analysis is needed. This paper addressed the development of an empirical model for predicting the operation performance and the annual energy consumption for the use of water-cooled air-conditioners. An experimental prototype was set up and tested in an environmental chamber in validating the empirical model. The predictions compared well with the experimental results. Furthermore, a high-rise residential building whole-year energy consumption simulation on applications of water-cooled air conditioners in South china was also analyzed. The results show 20.4% energy savings over air-cooled units while the increase in water-side consumption is 31.1%. The overall energy savings were estimated at 16.2% when including the additional water costs.