Air conditioning system

Abstract

A process and apparatus for controlling the air temperature in buildings, particularly large multi-room buildings, which eliminates the use of conventional refrigeration units during substantial portions of the year, providing a significant reduction in energy consumption. A liquid stream is cooled in an air cooling tower outside the building by contact with the ambient or outside air, is filtered to remove contaminants, and is circulated in a cyclical flow directly between the heat exchangers or induction unit coils in the building and the cooling tower outside the building, which preferably cools the liquid substantially to the outside ambient wet bulb air temperature. The system is used when the wet bulb temperature of the outside air is low enough to provide liquid at an effective cooling temperature, preferably at or below the desired temperature of the room air, and more preferably at a predetermined liquid temperature desired at the induction units for cooling. When the liquid at the output of the cooling tower is below the desired liquid cooling temperature, a suitable proportion of return liquid from the building is caused to bypass the cooling tower and is mixed with the cooling tower liquid. Additionally, the cooling liquid is prevented from circulating through the induction unit coils in the rooms in which slight heating is desired and return air from all the rooms is mixed with fresh air and recirculated through a conventional fan back to the rooms in which heat is desired to provide heating of the room air therein without the need to use a conventional heat generation unit. This process can be employed with existing systems having refrigeration and heat generation units.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.