An Intelligent, Efficient, and Cost Effective Design of an Air Conditioning System For Khartoum Airport Arrival Hall

Abstract

Khartoum Airport is the National Airport of our country Sudan and the Arrival Hall is the first impression a visitor to our country would have on entering the country. It is an important harbor and good attractive location to many fruitful investments and tourism for a visitor on coming to our country. The Hall was built in the late eighties of the last century. It is located in south east of Khartoum City. It is built up of two steel structures or hangers of dimension 60×100m and 39.35×60m . Recently, the current Air Conditioning System of the Arrival Hall suffers from many problems such as small cooling capacity of the units and the absence of air distribution system. This made part of the Hall very hot compared to the other parts. There is no preventive maintenance scheduled and no good supervision of these units due to different administration in the Airport which caused several times failures of the units From this point of view and to team up with my colleagues to give out excellent performance and good job, it is found that there should be a new design for the system. A system based on the actual load of the Hall, studying of the building of the Hall and number of occupants, lighting and appliances. As a result the Hall was divided into three sections as follows as it is shown in Figure (A1) Appendix A: Zone A: It is located on the eastern side of the Hall; its dimension is 60×30m.It accommodates Hall Manager office, VIP room and several security offices as well as Passports counters. Zone B: It is located in the middle of the Hall; its dimension 60×60m.It accommodates luggage belts and customs offices, Zone C: Where there is duty free shop, customs offices Civil Aviation offices and cafeteria. Its dimension 39.35× 60m. Accordingly, cooling load for each Zone was calculated for each and every hour in the day through all the summer months, being the hottest in the year bearing in mind that each Zone is at its maximum load. After that a suitable Air Conditioning system was selected which is found to be Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) which is a new product that refers v to the ability of the system to control the amount of refrigerant flowing to each of evaporators, enabling the use of many evaporators of different capacities in different zones and different configuration. Suitable Indoor and Outdoor units were selected according to the load of each Zone; also proper piping was accordingly selected and arranged for each system, besides availability of these units in Sudan was also checked. Indoor units were distributed and arranged throughout the Hall according to the cooling load of each Zone so as to achieve the optimum air distribution. Eco-V heat recovery ventilator is selected as part of the system. It is a new equipment to admit fresh air into the Hall, and circulate the return air. Suitable control system was selected which is an advance device to control a wide range of indoor units that can directly and continuously supervise the system, it can be programmed to monitor and remote control the units. The device has an extra ability of self- diagnosis facility which gives an instant message if there is any fault in the system. Finally the initial cost was calculated. Efficient air conditioning system is one of the most important criteria of evaluating perfect airport regarding good services given, so as the passengers could finish their check in without any trouble in an easy comfortable way.