Hivap – Hivap

THE HIVAP EVAPORATIVE COOLING PROCESS

HIVAP (short for ‘High Velocity Evaporation’) is an internationally patented, unique new evaporation PROCESS that can greatly reduce power consumption in cooling applications at very low cost. Being a process, it has a huge range of new and existing applications and opportunities including solar powered air conditioning, pre-cooling air conditioning and refrigeration condensers, data centre cooling, outdoor cooling (bars, restaurants, stadiums etc), industrial evaporation, greenhouses, cooling towers, heat transfer, desalination and even snow making machines.

HIVAP utilizes the principle of evaporative cooling but with an innovative, elegantly simple approach to how the evaporation occurs, using the velocity of the fan blades to rapidly evaporate mist ejected into the opposite direction airstream. A video describing the system is shown below:

SOLAR COOLING

The standout characteristics of HIVAP are its ability to do very large amounts of cooling using incredibly low energy, in a very small, extremely low cost package. This provides great opportunities for solar cooling applications such as arenas and sports stadiums (where seawater can even be used as the fluid), for solar powered cooling towers and right right down to air conditioning in dry climates. The opportunities and new and vast.

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COMMERCIAL COOLING

Commercial applications such as factories, warehouses, livestock and poultry sheds plus horticultural greenhouses are all ideal for cooling by HIVAP because of its low power usage and low cost, particularly in relation to building volume. Other applications include sports stadiums and urban centre outdoor cooling, patio, hotel and outdoor coolers, mining donga cooling and gas turbines and LNG plants.

LARGE SCALE OUTDOOR COOLING

Cooling of vast areas such as sports stadiums and urban centre outdoor cooling is now, for the first time, potentially able to use HIVAP, powered by the sun and even using seawater as the fluid, if available.

HEAT EXCHANGE AND INDUSTRY

In mining and industry there are countless requirements for heat exchange and HIVAP offers a range of cooling options to cool air, cool heat exchangers etc. In particular, it offers low energy solutions that can utilize waste-water and seawater as the cooling fluid.

Evaporative Condensers

Traditional sprayed mist and wetted pad evaporative systems have long been used to provide lower condensing temperatures and compressor horsepower savings in industrial HVAC systems.

HIVAP can be used as a more efficient method that can achieve even lower condenser temperatures and therefore greater energy savings for the HVAC system.

Cooling Towers

Cooling towers are heat removal devices used to transfer process waste heat to the atmosphere and often use the evaporation of water to remove process heat and cool the working fluid to near the wet-bulb air temperature. Common applications include cooling the circulating water used in oil refineries, petrochemical and other chemical plants, thermal power stations and HVAC systems for cooling buildings.

HIVAP offers a disruptive new approach to can replace these traditional cooling towers with more efficient cooling (lower approach and closer to wet bulb) that is smaller in size and uses less water and no chemicals, without any Legionnaires risk (HIVAP utilises a sealed heat exchanger, not open-air). Further, two stage HIVAP systems offer the potential to go below wet bulb and create even greater energy savings.

CONDENSER PRE-COOLING

HIVAP can be used to cool the condenser (‘hot side’) of a standard refrigerated air conditioning system (see pics below of a split-system condenser). A general rule of thumb for condenser temperature vs COP is that for every centigrade drop in condenser temperature there is a corresponding 1.8% drop in energy consumption.

So, if a standard condenser fan were to be replaced with a HIVAP ‘fan’ (as above picture to right) then if the condenser temperature could drop 20^C, this could equate to a 36% energy reduction. i.e. a 3.8kW power draw could reduce to 2.8kW. The approximate extra power for HIVAP over the standard fan would only be about 100W (0.1kW) so the conversion would pay for itself rapidly. The cooling fluid could simply be filtered waste grey-water from the washing machine, shower etc.

Typical 3.8kW air conditioners at typical current Australian power costs of $0.27 per kWhr therefore cost approximately $1 per hour to run. Depending on location in Australia, typical households run their air conditioners from 500-1,000 hours per year, although it can be as high as 2,000 hours in the far north. Nevertheless, if we use 750 hours as a representative average, a HIVAP pre-cooled system could save $270 per year in power costs.

Therefore, if installed as standard with the air conditioner, a customer could save $1,000 in less than 4 years. If installed as an aftermarket accessory at $750 install cost, the system could pay for itself within 3 years.

OUTDOOR MISTING

HIVAP should not be confused with well known misting coolers. Misting coolers simply pump a fine mist into the air stream in front of a fan, leaving a high percentage of unevaporated mist droplets in the air.

HIVAP is vastly superior to misting systems for the following reasons :

Traditional misting nozzles are located in front of fans in relatively low velocity air streams. HIVAP nozzles are located at the tips of the fan blades and so the exit speed is much higher (usually around 100 kph+), resulting is much higher rates of evaporation. Typically, the tip speed of a fan is 7 times the overall air speed produced by the fan. HIVAP exploits this principle by ejecting mist at a velocity 7 times greater than the overall air stream speed.
No pump is required. HIVAP uses the centrifugal force of the fan/disk to pressurize the nozzles so that no extra energy is required.

HIVAP nozzles run contra to the inlet air direction, adding additional velocity. Further, HIVAP nozzles also emit mist into the highest velocity, most turbulent air, resulting in extensive rates of evaporation.

MISCELLANEOUS APPLICATIONS

HIVAP air conditioners are essentially the front end of a ‘thermal’ desalination system, but instead of using heat to evaporate, the HIVAP high velocity mist spay technique is used. This potentially uses lower energy than thermal techniques. After evaporation, only the condensing side needs to be added to condense the freshwater out.

Desalination

Marine Air Conditioning

Because HIVAP is a low energy air conditioning system that can use seawater as the evaporative fluid, it represents a potential new solution for marine air conditioning.

Snow Making Machines

Snow making machines use a compressor to pressurize the nozzles to spay a mist in front of a fan-induced airflow. The water contains tiny nucleating particles to assist snow formation and by spraying the mist high into cold air, snow is formed.

Pharmaceutical Rotary Evaporators

Rotary evaporators are devices used in chemical laboratories for the removal of solvents from samples by evaporation. Most often, it is preferred not to use heat to assist in solvent removal and HIVAP offers the potential for high evaporation rates without requiring heat or vacuum.