Experiment study on the performance of energy recovery system in buildings

Tropical countries like Singapore, are countries whose hot and humid climate mostly lie outside the thermal comfort of a building occupant. Hence, if the occupant were to occupy a building without any cooling or dehumidifying system, the occupant will have to endure a great deal of discomfort due to the hot and humid Singapore weather. Hence, it is imperative in countries like Singapore to install Heating, Ventilation, And Cooling (HVAC) systems in buildings to achieve the prescribed thermal comfort. However, this has come at an expense of energy consumption. In order to curb away from this, devices like the Energy Recovery Ventilator (ERV) are installed together with the HVAC system to achieve energy savings. As such, the scope of this report will cover the performance evaluation of a membrane-based type ERV of a quasi-flow membrane core. Its objectives include that of investigating the effect of various parameters such as velocity and outside air on the ERV efficiency and its rate of energy recovered. From the experiment conducted the author found out that the parameters of outside air, as well as its velocity, have an effect on the efficiency where high level readings of OA parameter and velocity yield high efficiency. Whereas for the investigation of the energy recovery, it was observed that a high velocity results in high energy recovery. When it is compared to the performance of other ERVs of different core structure, the trend posed by the ERV in the experiment was shared by other ERV despite of the different core structure. However, due to the limitation of equipment that the author had at that point of time, the author is not able to quantify the performances of these ERV for comparison purposes. Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical Engineering