Cooling system for solar housing in the Middle East. A design study based on a concept.

Abstract: In the 21th century, energy use and resources have become a major issue. This is even tougher in the Middle East, one of the first producers of oil in the world, and also a high consumer. Air conditioning is a huge part of the consumption. On top that, no renewable energy is used at the moment in the region.The solar house concept studied in the following thesis is a direct answer to this concern. It includes an energy-efficient building using a low-consumption air conditioning system. This system comprises a chiller and a water tank to create and store cooling for the house on a daily basis. The chiller is directly linked to photovoltaic cells.The aim of this work is to investigate how much electricity can be spared for a family house cooling system with such a design. Simulations are made using a modelling tool to determine the cooling loads and the cooling system behaviour. Especially, the main interest is to get the area of solar panels needed, to balance the energy used to run the cooling system for one year. This study is made for three buildings for two climates.The results show that the highest heat gain source is the solar radiations. Care should be taken to reduce the windows areas. Besides, the choice of chiller and the strategy used can highly influence size of the water tank, although the solar panels area is reasonable. Both might be further decreased, if the strategy used is more precisely defined throughout the year.