Verification of Chiller Performance Promotion and Energy Saving

Abstract

In this paper, the model of chiller power consumption is built by using the regression analysis. While taking the parameters from the operation data of chiller into consideration simultaneously, i.e. Partial Load Ratio (PLR), chilled water supply temperature and cooling water return temperature, the prediction results are quite accurate, and its accuracy reaches over 99% in short-term prediction when compared with the actual power consumption. This method can be used to validate the benefits of the chiller’s energy saving method. The validation items include: the effect of water flow change on chiller’s performance while multiple chillers operate in parallel; the power consumption analysis of centrifugal chiller operating with or without frequency conversion; as well as the discussion on whether the cleaning of condenser coil can improve the Coefficient of Performance (COP) of chiller or not. The case study results show that, while multiple chillers operate in parallel, the water flow change has limited effect on the performance of chiller. However, about 36% electricity can be saved averagely when the chiller controls the frequency of electric power source at partial load, and the cleaning of condenser coil can increase the COP by 3.08%.