Muhammad Ahmad Jamil is a Ph.D. student at the Mechanical and Construction Engineering Department, Northumbria University Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He is working in the areas of unconventional cooling, energy efficiency, and net zero. His current research focus is the development of a novel indirect evaporative cooling system for net zero. He has made over 30 scholarly contributions including nearly peer-reviewed research papers, book chapters, and proceedings.
Heat exchangers are the mainstay of thermal systems and have been extensively used in desalination systems, heating, cooling units, power plants, and energy recovery systems. This chapter demonstrates a robust theoretical framework for heat exchangers investigation based on two advanced tools, i.e., exergoeconomic analysis and Normalized Sensitivity Analysis. The former is applied as a mutual application of economic and thermodynamic analyses, which is much more impactful than the conventional thermodynamic and economic analyses. This is because it allows the investigation of combinatory effects of thermodynamic and fiscal parameters which are not achieved with the conventional methods. Similarly, the Normalized Sensitivity Analysis allows a one-on-one comparison of the sensitivity of output parameters to the input parameters with entirely different magnitudes on a common platform. This rationale comparison is obtained by normalizing the sensitivity coefficients by their nominal values, which is not possible with the conventional sensitivity analyses. An experimentally validated example of a plate heat exchanger is used to demonstrate the application of the proposed framework from a desalination system.
Part of the book: Heat Exchangers
Rising global temperature has triggered the cooling demand in the last three decades with growing predictions for the future. The use of conventional energy-intensive and high global warming chemical-based cooling systems is working in a loop, increasing the global warming rate, emissions, and cooling system inventory. Therefore, the development of an innovative cooling system with high energy efficiency, low monetary cost, and environmentally sustainable. The indirect evaporative cooling-based systems have shown potential to serve the purpose because of low energy consumption, absence of energy, and cost-intensive equipment like compressors and water-based operation. A novel indirect evaporative cooler based on an innovative operational configuration is proposed, fabricated, and tested experimentally. The Proposed system has several advancements compared to the conventional indirect evaporative coolers like high operational reliability, low maintenance, and better control of the processes in the system. The study shows that the proposed system can achieve a temperature drop of as high as 14°C. The maximum cooling capacity of the system is calculated as 110 W, and the cooling performance index of 28. The performance of the cooler improves with increasing outdoor air temperature which makes it suitable for diverse climatic conditions. Moreover, the proposed design offers several benefits due to novel operational configurations by addressing limitations in the earlier systems.
Part of the book: Recent Updates in HVAC Systems