Experimental thermodynamic evaluation of a real cooling system with seawater-source and heat pump for a hotel in Turkey

Abstract

It is noteworthy that energy consumption is very high in hotels in order to provide the comfort requirements of human beings. Especially in summer season, cooling is an important condition for comfort in a hotel. In hotel cooling, seawater is an indispensable heat sink. In this study, the thermodynamic performance of a hotel cooling system with seawater-source and heat pump used with the aim of cooling a hotel located by sea is investigated. Using hourly data collected from the existing system during the summer of 2016, exergy analysis is performed. As the cooling system is at an industrial-scale involving copious equipment, it is divided into five different cooling zones. For cooling of a selected hotel room, the heat pump and variable refrigerant flow system in the zone where the room was located is also assessed. The results indicated that the hotel cooling system has the coefficient of performance, exergy efficiency, and improvement potential of 4.37, 66.5% and 77.7% on average, respectively. The zone requiring priority improvement is the fifth cooling zone due to air-conditioning plants and long pipelines. The equipment with the highest exergy destruction is the seawater heat exchanger. Due to low temperature difference between hotel room and seawater, it is necessary to increase use of these systems and develop them in terms of technology.