This report presents a summary of the findings and activities of Stage 3 of the LCL-CRC research project RP 1033 “High Performance Commercial Building HVAC”.

Highlights Population heat stress resilience was surveyed in Adelaide The empirical benefit of heat stress resistant buildings to health was confirmed Air-conditioning decreases passive adaptation but not necessarily health problems Introducing a Building Energy Performance Certificate was recommended Pre-existing health conditions and tenancy predict higher...

Highlights An isothermal process improves the dehumidification performance around 48%. A mathematic model could be used to predict the performance of the new wheel. The overlap of desiccant layers restricts heat exchange performance of the wheel. Desiccant cooling system with the new wheel has an...

Solar desiccant air-conditioning is an emerging technology that offers the promise of reducing reliance on grid connected electricity for providing comfort air-conditioning. Development of a method of assessing the seasonal energy savings of these devices would enable a fair comparison with alternative devices. This could...

Solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems are currently under rapid development and deployment due to their potential to reduce the use of fossil fuel resources and to alleviate greenhouse gas emissions in the building sector – a sector which is responsible for ~40% of the...

Solar-assisted cooling technology has enormous potential for air-conditioning applications since both solar energy supply and cooling energy demand are well correlated. Unfortunately, market uptake of solar cooling technologies has been slow due to the high capital cost and limited design/operational experience. In the present work...

This paper presents energetic, economic, and environmental (3E) analyses of four configurations of solar heating and cooling (SHC) systems based on coupling evacuated tube collectors with a single-effect LiBre-H2O absorption chiller. In the first configuration (SHC1), a gas-fired heater is used as the back-up system...

Conventionally in building performance simulations (BPS), it is assumed that air entering outdoor HVAC equipment is at the outdoor ‘ambient’ temperature, obtained from a weather file. However, significant spatial variations exist in outdoor air temperature fields, especially within the thermal boundary layers that form near...

Desiccant wheel based air-conditioning systems (DWAC) include a desiccant wheel component that performs latent cooling coupled to another component, for example an indirect evaporative cooler (IEC also known as a dew point evaporative cooler), that performs the sensible cooling without adding moisture into the air...

The photovoltaic thermal (PV/T) driven desiccant air cooling process could be a good solution to the conventional air cooling cycle in terms of energy saving, where the latent cooling load would be removed adiabatically. However, problems exist where the required desiccant regeneration temperature (60oC -...