In severe - hot and humid - climates, Vehicles Air Conditioning Systems (AC systems) in use today suffers from a lack of performance and on a difficulty to efficiently meet the cooling load without causing a significant reduction in the performance of the internal combustion engine. This is especially true in applications where vehicles have long idling period and a lot of passengers, such as buses and passenger shuttles.
An integrated cooling system has been implemented and tested in an Airport Passenger shuttle in order to improve fuel economy and cooling effectiveness in severe environment (up to 120 °F). The cooling system integrates a high-efficiency thermal storage technology (based on phase change materials) coupled to high performance compressors.
Comprehensive performance analyses and testing of the high-performance system have highlighted many benefits of using the technology in such applications.
This papers presents the system and shows the monitoring results (in terms of outside conditions and comfort conditions, effective capacity in operation, time to meet the load from start-up, reduction in energy consumption) of the implementation with monitored data in the passenger shuttle applications.