Night Cooling

This work analyses the general principles that may guide the design and construction of bioclimatic, low-tech, low-cost medicine warehouses for hot-arid and hot-humid climates and investigating some thermal performances of specific design solutions aiming to that. The solutions that have been analysed are aimed to be easily buildable and suited to be approached with self-construction methods.

A manual for the construction and design of affordable, passively-cooled medicine warehouses in hot climates is presented. The manual addresses design hypotheses aimed at being low-cost, low-tech, easily buildable, and self-buildable, as well as easy to maintain. These designs aim to maintain internal temperatures low enough to robustly preserve medicines. Construction hypotheses are detailed, and their ability to meet these requirements is verified. The thermal behaviour of the proposed solutions has been analysed using the ESP-r platform. The manual has been made available online under a Creative Commons license.

Radiant panel cooling is still considered uncommon in Malaysia due to unavailability of local manufacturers with limited architects or engineers who are familiar in the system. The initial construction cost for radiant cooling system may be higher than air system and not forgetting the need for a smaller supplementary air system to dehumidify the air to avoid condensation which is an inherited problem of the system in hot and humid region. Promotion and public awareness is lacking in the country and very much dependable on government demonstration program of green technology application where only a few governments owned building having such system. With the aim of long term energy and cost saving this study looks into the development of custom design and locally assembled low cost radiant cooling panel and how its performance in comparison to its overseas and more expensive counterpart could help in provide alternative cheaper building cooling system. Custom build cooling panels wi...

This dissertation was written as a part of the MSc in Energy Systems at the International Hellenic University. Compared to dwellings, non-domestic buildings tend to have higher energy consumption per square meter of floor area. Office buildings consume a lot due to the fact that they have special characteristics that enhance this problem. Lighting, IT equipment and air conditioning systems are considered main reasons for steeply rising energy consumption in office buildings. Moreover, in the last decades the buildings have spatial characteristics that provoke more energy consumption through their usage (glazed facades etc.). Nowadays, the rate of new constructions is rather limited, mainly due to financial reasons. Hence, refurbishment of existing building stock is an intense necessity in the urban environment. New policies are adopted from EU in order to improve energy efficiency of non-residential buildings. This effort has given a new perspective to the redevelopment of the construction sector of the economy. This dissertation provides a methodology to face current problems of existing office buildings, the first renovation measures, restoration of facades, replacement of HVAC and lighting systems with the primary goal of minimizing energy consumption by implementing passive design techniques with RE Systems in order to correspond to standards of building that consume as little energy as possible .The end goal of high energy performance can be achieved by using passive solar building design(enabling the building to collect solar heat in winter and reject solar heat in summer) thus using alternative methods of energy production. To conclude, a case study of refurbishment of an existing office building in Thessaloniki is formed. I would like to thank Professor A.M. Papadopoulos for his valuable guidance during the writing of this dissertation and my family and friends for their support and assistance.

Multizone building energy simulation programs become popular among building designers. They include a wide variety of techniques and advanced heat transfer models, yet require only limited computation time. Unfortunately, the use of correlations to predict the convective heat transfer undermines their reliability. The correlations actually apply only to specific cases. Meanwhile, convective heat transfer modelling is particularly important in mixed convection regimes with high ventilation rates. It is selfevident that researchers would investigate to what extent including more room/system design parameters is necessary to model mixed convection heat transfer. The authors of this study imitated sequences of typical mixed convection cooling regimes (a day regime possibly preceded by night cooling) in a modified PASLINK cell and varied the air supply/exhaust configuration and added to some cases a thermally massive floor. The analysis was based on airflow data and the convective heat flux. The results indicate that the air supply/exhaust configuration is important when high ventilation rates are combined with heterogeneously distributed thermal mass. Existing convection correlations cannot predict the convective heat flux accurately for the studied cases.