Indicator-based energy diagnosis for cooling water system

Abstract

The performance of the cooling water system strongly affects the energy efficiency of centralized chiller plant. However, many cooling water systems are not well operated. Energy diagnosis is necessary to enhance the system efficiency. The existing energy diagnosis methods rely on expert experience and are time-consuming and expensive. Therefore, this chapter presents an indicator-based diagnosis method for the cooling water systems. In this method, four indicators are defined to quantitatively evaluate the performance of the system. These indicators can be calculated by a standard process. By reading the indicators, building managers and operators can easily find the energy-waste problems and estimate the energy-saving potential. This method has been applied in a large-scale commercial building in Hong Kong. This application is presented in detail to show this method. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.