Dubai: Solar-cooled, 6,000 m2 Office Building
Under the burning sun of Dubai, United Arab Emirates: 161 m2 of vacuum tube collectors by Irish manufacturer Kingspan Renewables provide enough heat for 6 small-size absorption chillers with a 10 kW cooling capacity by Swedish company Climatewell. Photo: Climatewell.
Under the burning sun of Dubai, United Arab Emirates: 161 m2 of vacuum tube collectors by Irish manufacturer Kingspan Renewables provide enough heat for 6 small-size absorption chillers with a 10 kW cooling capacity by Swedish company Climatewell. The chillers cover half of the cooling demand of a 6,000 m2 office building, which also includes a training facility and a warehouse.
The new office building of ESAB, a world leading supplier of welding products based in Dubai, is a show case structure for an efficient solar cooling system. ESAB pushed for the investment, which was entirely financed from private sources, because the corporation was concerned about the environment and the operation costs of air-conditioning in a hot and humid city such as Dubai.
Three of the in total six small-scale Climatewell absorption chillers with a cooling capacity of 10 kW and an energy storage capacity of 56 kWh each. Photo: Climatewell.
It was Pax Kent, a UAE company specialized on turn-key construction projects, which won the tender in 2009. Together with its principal office in Sweden, Scandinavian Cooling, Pax Kent became sub-contractor for providing a turnkey HVAC solution for the project. Kingspan and Climatewell supplied the equipment to the Scandinavians, who designed a very efficient air-conditioning solution.
“The design of the building and the solar cooling solution made the joint investment not more expensive than a conventional solution,” Climatewell Group CEO Per Olofsson names the main factor for the success behind the winner’s solution. “We have cut the needed peak power in half by using the building as an energy storage and we have cut energy consumption in half by using solar cooling,” Lars Olof Johansson, Senior Design Engineer of Scandinavian Cooling/Pax Kent, adds.
Olofsson explains the technical details of the system as follows: “The six Climatewell chillers and the back-up compression chillers deliver cooled water to the cooling coils in the air handling units. The cold is distributed from there throughout the building via hollow cores in concrete slabs, thus utilizing the thermal mass of the concrete to obtain peak load reduction.”
The annual solar share of the system is estimated to be 50 % of the already reduced cooling demand. “Depending on the season, the share of solar cooling is going to vary between some 30 and 100 % of the total cooling load,” explains Olofsson. Helping to increase the share of solar energy will be the task of the integrated energy storage of the Climatewell models consisting of dry salt. The recooling process occurs in a cooling tower, whose high water demand is covered by the desalination of sea water.
More information:
Pax Kent / Scandinavian Cooling: http://www.paxkent.com
http://www.climatewell.com
http://www.kingspansolar.com
