USE OF EVAPORATIVELY COOLED UNDERGROUND WATER STORAGE FOR CONVECTIVE COOLING OF BUILDINGS - AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

Convective cooling of a room through a heat exchanger (cooling loop) u sing cold water from an underground evaporatively cooled water storage tank has been studied. The water in the tank is being evaporatively c ooled by a suitable aeration system (aeration loop). The performance o f the system is evaluated in terms of a seasonal discomfort index of t he room. The effects of size of storage tank, mass flow rates in the a eration loop and cooling loop, temperature penalties of the aeration l oop and cooling loops on the performance of the system have been numer ically investigated. The analysis shows that, for given system paramet ers (corresponding to a specific value of discomfort index), there is an optimum value of mass flow rate in the aeration loop for which the total pumping energy required to operate the aeration and cooling loop s is a minimum.