Abstract—Cold seawater air-conditioning is a process in which seawater from the deep ocean is pumped to a heat exchanger to process the cooling load of large buildings. The use of cold seawater air conditioning is most competitive in tropical islands, where air conditioning demands are high and the physical distance to cold seawater is at a minimum. This study was therefore initiated to assess the technical and economical aspect of using deep seawater to meet the air conditioning load for hotels located near the sea, having a cooling load of around 1000 tons A/C which is equivalent to 3.5 GW. Three cooling system options were chosen for study namely the Vapor compression chiller system (Option 1), Direct Seawater Air Conditioning (Option 2) and Seawater Air Conditioning using Chiller (Option 3). The conventional vapor compression system was used as a baseline to compare the other options that use cold seawater. The direct cold seawater air conditioning system consisted of a large seawater pipeline and pump to deliver cold seawater to a large heat exchanger that transfers heat directly with the building’s chilled water system. The third option was similar to the second one; however, it consisted of a reversible chiller to further cool the fresh water. The technical assessment of the three options consisted of the power consumption of each system to meet the hotel cooling load. Power consumption was found to be 3500 kW, 470 kW and 1870 kW for the three options respectively. The carbon dioxide gas emissions that would be avoided were found to be 13 ton and 7 ton per day by implementing option 2 and 3 respectively compared to option 1. The economic assessment showed that option 2 had a payback period of 6.5 years while the investments costs on option 3 would be recovered in 4 years.
Index Terms—Air condition, cooling, sea water.
The authors are with the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, University of Mauritius, Reduit, Mauritius (email: dsurroop@uom.ac.mu, abhi_rcpl@yahoo.com).
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Cite: Dinesh Surroop and Abba Abhishekanand, "Technical and Economic Assessment of Seawater Air Conditioning in Hotels," International Journal of Chemical Engineering and Applications vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 382-387, 2013.
