A heat recovery system for air conditioning which allows disposal of wet cooling towers

The combined run-around coil heat recovery and cooling plant has been in full operation for about four months at the time of writing and appears to be performing as predicted. The predicted energy saving was 19,000 GJ/year and the actual is around 18,000 GJ/year. It provides a general limited cooling facility of 6 degrees K where previously cooling existed for operating theatres only. The capital cost of the total project was 390,000 pounds and disregarding fuel price fluctuations the heat recovery scheme should pay for itself in about seven years. In addition to the heat recovery and cooling provisions offered the scheme also enabled correction of a frost protection problem plus disposal of an existing wet cooling tower and hence should reduce the risk of Legionnaires Disease. Had these two projects been implemented separately the cost would have been 80,000 pounds but without heat recovery. The advantages of the scheme may be summarised as follows. Energy Cost Savings Frost Protection Elimination of Wet Cooling Tower Cooling Facility It is believed that a scheme as described in this paper would be of benefit to other existing hospitals and should be considered at the design stage of future new hospitals. At IRH it was possible to dispense completely with a wet cooling tower; for other schemes this may also be possible or at least the size and capacity of cooling towers could be reduced.