Radiant Cooling with Dehumidified Air Ventilation for Thermal Comfort in Buildings in Tropical Climate

Radiant cooling is an alternative air-conditioning that havs been implemented successfully in high latitude regions. In tropical region as Thailand, radiant cooling is quite challenge due to its cooling performance being limited by high-moisture ambient air. This paper reports an investigation of radiant cooling in a tropical building. The study comprises full-scale experiments of a radiant cooling system with cool panels installed in a room of a laboratory building. A separate fan coil unit was installed to remove humidity of the ventilation air before suppluying it into the room. A software namely TRNSYS was used to model the systems in order to determine the heat extraction rate of the cool panels. Thermal comfort level in the room was evaluated by predicted mean vote (PMV) index. The results show that the radiant cooling is able to use for air conditioning for human comfort in tropical buildings. However, a sophistical system to control temperature of the chilled water supplied to the cool panels and the fan coil unit for the ventilation air dehumidification is inevitably required. (C) 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.