Controlling the comfort of large heat load rooms in the tropical region at low cost
Rudi Irawan (a*), Mohamad Yamin (a), Ricky Therisno (b)

(a) Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Industrial Technology, Gunadarma University, Jalan Margonda Raya, No. 100, Depok, West Java, Indonesia.
(b) Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Atma Jaya Catholic University, Indonesia

* rirawan2010[at]gmail.com

Abstract

Staff productivity becomes main concern in modern business. There are many requirements to maximise staff productivity staffs in a company. Working in a comfort room is one of them. Working in a comfortable room will result in good productivity, but also good quality of product. Among of criteria of room comfort are temperature, humidity, oxygen content and air flow. People commonly use air conditioner (AC) to make a room as a convenient place to work. However, it is not rare the room is very big and heat load very high, such as a production building in industries in which may have many machineries installed and an open space office. In this situation, using an AC system to make a room comfortable may not a good option, because it will require high capital cost and very costly operational cost. Other technologies, non-AC, may be a better choice, instead. In this report, other approaches, such as well-arranged fans, direct evaporative cooler device, underground evaporative cooler chamber, and down hole heat exchanger are explained. The techniques have been simulated, developed, and tested for open space offices and plant production buildings. All techniques have been able to make the rooms more convenient with minimum capital cost and operational cost. These approaches to some extend even also provide better comfort index as compared to AC, because they are not only able to lower down the temperature, but also supply fresh air and air flow. The main different between the technologies reported here and AC system, they need a room with well ventilated, and do not require chemical, such as refrigerant.

Keywords: evaporative cooler, down hole heat exchanger, temperature, humidity, air flow, oxygen content

Topic: Physics and Applied Physics