Resilient cooling strategies: a preliminary study of an all-air system application

Resilient cooling is the ability of a building-plant system to withstand and recover after a disruptive event. In particular, heatwaves and power outages have been considered in this study as perturbations of a building-plant system. The present work investigated the operation of an all-air HVAC system combined with two air to water heat pumps in Copenhagen, Denmark. TRNSYS simulations considered both current and future outdoor climatic conditions, both in mid and long term, to evaluate building’s energy use. The results showed that during heatwaves operative temperatures higher than 28 °C were registered, but only for 5 to 20% of the occupied time in the worst scenario. The variation was due to the cooling load, which increased as the heatwave increased in length and intensity. Nevertheless, the energy use did not considerably increase with values between 33 to 39 kWh/(m2 y) but the system resulted to be non-resilient in most of the cases that combine heatwaves with power outages.