Hello Steemians,
Today I watched an interesting video. It is about innovative thermal storage tank cooling for air conditioning in the University of Utah. In a regular building, a machine called chiller is used and that makes cold water and this cold water is circulated through the building so that the building is cooled. But the problem is, the chiller uses 10 to 15 per cent of the energy of the building uses throughout the year.
What they did was brilliant!!
Before implementing thermal energy storage technique, university ran an irrigation system from a deep well down by their stadium and water was pumped from a thousand feet down in the ground and the water is actually pretty cold. This system runs all summer long and by the building.
After hearing this the engineers came up with an idea. They thought of making use of this cold water for air conditioning of the building. For that, they took the irrigation water at night, pumped and stored it in the tank that is 400,000 gallons almost as big as an Olympic sized swimming pool. They stored that tank full of cold water all night long. The cold water is pumped out of this tank and ran through the building the next day before it went to the irrigation system and the sprinklers on campus and that's how the building is cooled.
Image: Water storage tank
They did a lot of a computer simulation and analysis to make this system work well. Today they don't need to use any kind of air conditioning or any kind of energy to cool the building throughout the year.
Image: Simulations
Source: