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Abstract

Yangtze Region of China has high temperature in summer and low temperature in winter, with high humidity most of the year. The conventional household air conditioner cannot control temperature and humidity separately. Recently, the research on temperature and humidity independent control mainly focused on large-scale buildings; however, study on small-scale buildings throughout the year was limited. This paper introduces a novel household air-conditioning system suits for small-scale buildings in hot-humid climate region, named coupled radiation panels with household replacement fresh air (RP&HRFA) system, which could independently control the temperature and relative humidity of the indoor air. The RP&HRFA system can be operated in five different modes so as to be adaptive to different weather conditions all year round. In this paper, an experimental study under three operating modes, namely, summer, transitive season A, and winter B, were carried out. The overall and local thermal comfort indexes of the system were investigated under stable experiment operation conditions. The experimental results indicated that these indexes basically met the requirements of ISO7730 and ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 55-2010.

Practical application: This paper introduced a novel household air-conditioning system suits for small-scale buildings in hot-humid climate region, which could independently control the temperature and relative humidity of the indoor air. The experimental results under three operating modes indicated that the system could provide an acceptable indoor thermal comfort for occupants. Such a system could be applied to small-scale buildings in hot humid region for its good thermal comfort.

Keywords

Radiation panels household replacement fresh air thermal comfort PMV–PPD

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An experimental study on indoor thermal comfort of the coupled radiation panels with household replacement fresh air system

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