Parametric study of condensation at heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning duct's external surface

Abstract

The compression of insulation causes around a heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning duct usually resulted in dew formation around the outer surfaces because of low temperature, which causes significant energy and financial losses. The parameters such as supply airflow rate, supply air temperature, ambient airspeed, and the convective heat transfer coefficient (ho) plays significant role in dew formation. In this paper, the parametric study is performed to investigate the effects of these parameters on the external surface temperature of the duct to avoid condensation. A mathematical model is developed to quantify these effects using preliminary data obtained from the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system of a pharmaceutical company.The results reveal that external surface temperature increases with an increase in insulation thickness and supply air temperature, whereas it decreases with higher supply air flow rate. It is estimated that the minimum insulation thickness at joint and bend should be maintained between 15-55 and 15-35 mm, respectively, with a variation in ho between 6 and 22W/m 2 K to avoid condensation. Additionally, it is estimated that air flow rate should be greater than 1.4m 3 /s at 10W/m 2 K and 2.2m 3 / s at 22W/m 2 K. Similarly, the ambient air speed should be greater than 2.8 m/s at 6W/m 2 K, respectively.Practical application: Building services engineers have a paucity of information on the effects of the compression of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning duct thermal insulation. It can cause condensation that will adversely affect the insulation material, thereby increasing the maintenance cost as well increasing the heat loss from the duct so affecting the conditions of supply air. Proper insulation thickness and operating parameters are important for building owners and operators to control ongoing expenses of buildings. This paper seeks to quantify the effect of insulation compression to improve understanding so that this important area may be properly considered by the building services engineer.

Indoor air distribution in a room with underfloor air distribution and chilled ceiling: Effect of ceiling surface temperature and supply air velocity

“…Normally, a large supply air velocity was caused by the limitation of the cooled surface temperature to avoid condensation, so the ceiling surface temperature could indirectly influence the vertical air temperature profiles. 22 Figure 7(a) and (b) shows that there were clearly positive air velocity gradients above 1.7 m in cases 3 and 6, which were different from other cases under the condition of a constant sensible cooling load. This may be due to the large supply air velocity in cases 3 and 6 compared to other cases.…”

Economic and Environmental Impacts of Thermal Insulation Used in Different Duct Sizes

“…where M and SV are the ratio of annual maintenance and the salvage value to initial investment, d and e represent inflation and interest rate and N denotes lifetime. The value of P2 will be equal to P1 if operation and maintenance cost is zero [10,13,19,23,27,28]. The total life cycle cost of cooling loss is calculated as:…”

Life-cycle cost analysis of building wall and insulation materials

“…Buildings are essential to human beings as they provide acceptable level of thermal comfort to occupants and operating conditions for manufacturing process (Kumar et al, 2018a). However, the building sector consumes 32% of primary energy use (Alam et al, 2019).…”