Design and Development of a Novel Approach to Cooling Systems in Domestic Households

Raj, Noel Chris (2020) Design and Development of a Novel Approach to Cooling Systems in Domestic Households. Final Year Project (Bachelor), Tunku Abdul Rahman University College.

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Abstract

Air-conditioners can almost be found in every domestic household nowadays especially in Malaysia as Malaysia is hot and humid all year round. However, the use of modern-day air-conditioners has contributed to world problems like global warming and it has high energy consumption as well which are surprisingly not known to many users. In conjunction with that, this project presents the design and development of a novel approach to cooling systems in domestic households. It promotes the purpose of providing an alternative cooling system which will be an underground cooling system that will supply a comfortable and cool temperature in domestic households while using lesser energy. This process will not require the uses of harmful gases, refrigerant and compressors. This cooling system will comprise of two axial fans, earth tubes and ducting for air supply around the household. The axial fans will bring it outside air into the earth tubes where heat exchange will be done with the cooler underground temperature before being supplied throughout the home. Research papers over the years, related articles and journals were used in order to have a deeper understanding into the subject on hand. Thorough analysis had been done in the process of this project. The depth of earth tubes to be placed underground will be at 1.0m depth with its length at 25m long alongside a diameter of 0.076m. The software mainly to be used will be SolidWorks and ANSYS where it has determined that a sharp ‘S’ tube layout will be ideal as it proved to the strongest and most rigid layout as well as proving a simulated temperature difference of 7.5˚C. Through the discovery and results obtained from the software, a scaled-down model was constructed. Damp soil was used to represent the soil at 1m depth, a hairdryer was used to represent the axial fans and 20mm diameter High-Density Polyethylene Tube were used as the tubes. The results obtained has shown that the scaled-down prototype managed to bring the inlet temperature of 48.1˚C down to 25.2˚C which brings a total temperature reduction 22.9˚C. This proves the Sharp ‘S’ shaped tube layout to be the most suitable for the implementation of this cooling system.