Specifying Air Conditioning Requirements for Commercial Buildings of Ethiopia
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2014-04
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Having Conditioned air is a non questionable comfort issue for both commercial and
residential buildings. To do so there should be a specified air condition requirements for air
conditioning design so that the required comfort will effectively be attained. Specifying the
local or national air conditioning requirements is the only way to effectively attain the human
comfort while constructing any building.
The main intension of this paper is to specify the air conditioning requirements based on
local or national data. Mainly the cooling load in w/m2 which is the main parameter for AC
design is determined for representative areas of Ethiopia using the HAP software. These
selected representative areas are at different temperature zones. These are Addis Ababa for
moderate temperature, Bahir-Dar for warm temperature, Dire-Dawa for hot temperature, and
Semera for very hot temperature.
While doing this paper first the weather data for the selected areas of Ethiopia are collected
from the National Metrology Agency. Also the architectural data or floor plans are gathered
for each representative room types. Then all the data are entered in to the soft ware and
analyzed by keeping some parameters like relative humidity as a checking point for comfort
conditions. Finally the main AC design parameters are specified. Mainly the cooling load in
w/m2 for all representative areas of the country is specified for rooms of various applications.
The results show that the air conditioning design for commercial buildings depend on many
factors. These are geographical locations, orientation of the building, types of applications to
which the building is used for, number of population, the floor to which the room is located
and the material to which the building is made. In general it is observed that north oriented
buildings have lower cooling load in relative to other orientations. And the cooling load is
specified for based on north orientation. And also other parameters have their own effect on
the effective design of the room from AC perspective. Hence it is recommended for the air
conditioning designers of the commercial building to use these local or national standards in
which the above factors are considered and to have an effective air conditioning system.
Description
Keywords
With Specialization in Thermal Engineering