BEEE’s PhD Student Won the Best Paper Award in Student Category at the NCRAC 2022 Conference

The Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering (BEEE) of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) is pleased to announce that our PhD students, Dharmasastha Kumar won the best paper award in Student Category at the NCRAC 2022 for a paper entitled “Influence of water flow path on thermal comfort of radiant cooling system - An experimental study”.

NCRAC 2022 Conference

7th National and 1st International Conference on Refrigeration and Air Conditioning (NCRAC-2022) is organised by the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati and Indian Institute of Technology Tirupati, India. The conference was held from 24 to 26th February 2022. The theme of the conference was Energy Efficient and Environment-Friendly HVAC&R Systems. It was organised in association with Indian Society of Heating Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers (ISHRAE) Guwahati Sub-Chapter and it is supported by ISHRAE and American Society of Heating and Refrigeration Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

Paper Title:

Influence of Water Flow Path on Thermal Comfort of Radiant Ceiling Cooling System - An Experimental Study

Abstract:

Construction and operation in the building sector account for more than 1/5th of global energy consumption. Moving on to an energy-efficient cooling technology and eco-friendly building material can lead to energy saving and reduction in associated CO2 emissions. In the present study, an energy-efficient thermally activated building system (TABS) is integrated with eco-friendly building material, namely, glass fibre reinforced gypsum (GFRG). The proposed hybrid system is termed as thermally activated glass fibre reinforced gypsum (TAGFRG) system. This system is not only energy-efficient and eco-friendly but also provides better thermal comfort. An experimental room is constructed with the TAGFRG roof within the Indian Institute of Technology Madras campus, Chennai, i.e., in a tropical warm and humid climate zone. The TAGFRG roof has reinforcement in every third cavity while the cooling pipes are embedded in the other two with air gap and partial reinforcement. The TAGFRG roof has four parallel loops of cooling pipelines, and each loop consists of one reinforcement zone (RZ) and two air gap zones (AZ1 and AZ2) in series. According to the water flow path in a single loop, various combinations of the flow path, i.e., RZàAZ1àAZ2, AZ1àRZàAZ2 and AZ1àAZ2àRZ, have been analyzed. The influence of the water flow path on thermal comfort is insignificant. The average operative temperature for all the cases investigated varies between 28.1 and 29.2°C. The operative temperature is always within the 90% thermal comfort band. 

Experiment Setup:

The Department would like to congratulate Mr. Dharmasastha Kumar on the excellent achievement. We wish him continued success.