Min-Hwi Kim

• Ph D
• Senior Researcher at Korea Institute of Energy Research

The primary objective of this paper is to propose the integration of a hot water cooling system with a desiccant-assisted evaporative cooling system for air conditioning a data center. The feasibility of the integrated system is analyzed by a detailed energy simulation for a model data center by using TRNSYS (transient system simulation) 16 with a...

Achieving 'carbon neutrality' in the building sector involves high penetration of renewables, electrification of energy use, and improved flexible interactions with the grid to balance energy supply and demand. This study analyzed one year in an urban energy community powered entirely by electricity, using high levels of renewable sources. By facil...

In this study, the empirical results of renewable energy self-sufficiency for communities consisting of residential and nonresidential buildings were analyzed. These buildings were combined with a grid-connected electrified community. The community was primarily powered by building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) systems, and cooling and heating wat...

The utilization of renewable energy sources have gained significant attention in recent years for greenhouse that consumed lots of cooling and heating energy. This study investigated a solar thermal and seasonal thermal-based renewable energy convergence system. This system consists of a solar thermal system, tank- and borehole-type seasonal therma...

This study investigates the economic benefits of solar thermal and seasonal thermal energy storage based on a renewable energy conversion system for greenhouses. The proposed system consists of solar collectors, seasonal thermal energy storage, hybrid-source heat pumps, and ground-source heat pumps. The heat generated from the proposed system was s...

Data analysis and collection techniques now allow for detailed inventory‐building of urban rooftops for the purposes of identifying solar energy potential within geographically defined boundaries, including those of cities. The complexity and inherent diversity of a city's building stock has propelled the introduction of many so‐called “solar city”...

To effectively analyze building energy, it is important to utilize the environmental data that influence building energy consumption. This study analyzed outdoor and indoor data collected from buildings to find out the conditions of rooms that had a significant effect on heating and cooling energy consumption. To examine the conditions of the rooms...

This study evaluated the energy saving potential of renewable energy generation systems based on integrated solar energy in an urban environment. The solar city concept was implemented using photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal systems. As a case study, the Sejong national pilot smart city in South Korea was selected to evaluate the renewable energy...

This study investigated the applicability and thermal performance of heat prosumers in a bidirectional thermal network through experimental analysis. To realize the bidirectional thermal network and heat prosumers, the existing small-scale centralized district cooling and heating system was retrofitted to form a small-scale heat network with three...

District cooling and heating methods that can utilize highly efficient heat pumps and various unused new and renewable types of energy are required to achieve low carbon emissions and zero energy usage in buildings and community units. The technical requirements for the implementation of decentralized thermal networks and heat trading are increasin...

The demand for district heating and cooling systems in block units with a heat pump that utilizes various unused energy sources for energy supply has been increasing. This study investigated experimentally the ground source heat pump (GSHP) and sewage water source heat pump (SWSHP) facilities used in block cooling and heating networks. Then, a heat...

Due to the wide-spread use of photovoltaic (PV) systems, interest regarding economic benefit and energy-sharing from surplus electricity has been raised. In this study, decentralized thermal and electric convergence energy prosumers for an energy-sharing community are proposed. For the convergence energy system, a simultaneous heating and cooling h...

Due to increased grid problems caused by renewable energy systems being used to realize zero energy buildings and communities, the importance of energy sharing and self-sufficiency of renewable energy also increased. In this study, the energy performance of an energy-sharing community was investigated to improve its energy efficiency and renewable...

Increasing the energy supplement from renewable energy systems is one of the major issues for preparing the climate change challenges. In order to expanding the energy supplement from the renewable energy, the surplus energy should be generated in the community. This study presents the feasibility of configuration of net plus energy community by re...

A techno-economic analysis of a hybrid renewable energy system, consisting of a solar thermal system, seasonal thermal energy storage (STES), heat pump systems, and district heating network for a net zero energy community has been conducted. Thermal and electric energy performance of the proposed systems were evaluated using detailed simulation mod...

The main objective of this study was to develop a thermoelectric heat pump and liquid desiccant system based on a dedicated outdoor air system (THPLD-DOAS). An internally-cooled and -heated liquid desiccant system was used and a thermoelectric heat pump (THP) served as the desiccant cooling and heating energy source for dehumidification and regener...

The main purpose of this research is to suggest a virtual water flowmeter applicable in hydraulic systems with low-cost sensors. Practical procedures for realizing virtual water flowmeters for constant flow pumps (i.e., Cases 1 and 2) and variable flow pumps (i.e., Cases 3 and 4) are proposed in this paper. In Case 1, for measuring the water flow r...

Massive thermal effluent energy from power plant is mostly released to the sea, and only a little is used for fishing culture and agriculture in South Korea. The thermal effluent from the power plant can be an efficient heat source of the heat pump system to provide heating energy for the greenhouse, but energy loss and pump power by long distance...

With the recent development of the IT technology, the demand for data centers has significantly increased, and modular data centers have attracted considerable attention because of their excellent stability, scalability, and economic feasibility. This research quantitatively analyzed the applicability of various air-side economizers and their energ...

The purpose of this study was to enhance the energy-saving potential of an indirect and direct evaporative cooling-assisted 100% outdoor air system (IDECOAS) by integrating it with either a solid or liquid desiccant system. The desiccant system can be installed either at the scavenger air side of the indirect evaporative cooler (IEC) to enhance its...

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze energy saving potentials of various economizers in modular data center by thermal conditions and locations in response to explosive IT demand and data centers' energy consumption increase. To investigate holistic energy saving potentials, various server thermal characteristics, economizers, and locations...

This paper proposes a server model that can be applied to simulating the annual cooling energy consumption of data centers and an analysis of its impact. Recently, aisle containment architecture and the variable air volume system have been widely adopted in the data center industry because of their superior indoor thermal management and cooling ene...

An air-handler fan pressurization method can be used to estimate envelope leakage in large or tall buildings. However, because the size of a building's air handling system is designed only to meet heating and cooling demands, there may be many unanticipated problems on the test site. For example, one may not be able to perform the envelope leakage...

The purpose of this paper was to introduce and investigate the energy and thermal performance of a desiccant and evaporative cooling based 100% outdoor air system. The concept of proposed system is decoupled system with dividing the sensible and latent cooling load in order to restrict the usage of vapor compression cooling system. In this point of...

In this study, a hybrid ventilation system was proposed to reduce indoor heating and cooling loads owing to ventilation by using the heat storage and discharge effects of some heat storage materials. A pilot system of the ventilating system, comprised of heat storage material, a filter, as well as supply and exhaust fans, was also built. To measure...

In general, HVAC systems for clean room facility are required significant energy to maintain the required indoor environment. Due to high air change rates, reducing operating energy consumptions has been the critical issue. The purpose of this paper is to investigate energy saving potentials of 100% outdoor air system integrated with indirect and d...

The main thrust of this research is to verify the heating energy reduction capacity of an indirect and direct evaporative cooler assisted 100% outdoor air system (IDECOAS) via actual winter operation of the pilot unit installed in a campus building. A conventional variable air volume (VAV) system was also installed for comparison with the proposed...

This study aims to present the fundamentals in which operation of a 100% outdoor air system integrates with indirect and direct evaporative cooling systems and to estimate its energy saving potential. The simulation of the proposed system is performed using a commercial equation solver program, and the annual operation energy saving potential with...

In this study, a pilot Dry Coil IEC unit, an indirect evaporation cooler established by connecting a direct evaporation cooler and a sensible heat exchanger (SHE) in series, was made, and the effectiveness data of the pilot unit were acquired under various operation conditions in an environmental chamber realizing a wide-range of indoor and outdoor...

The objective of this research is to determine overall heat transfer coefficients (U-value) of the exterior walls, floors, and roof of a Korean traditional residence via field measurement of transient heat flow and temperature difference across each envelope. The acquired U-values are compared with other existing values and those for current reside...

The main thrust of this paper is to investigate a practical way of generating the monthly averaged daily horizontal solar radiation in Korea. For estimating the horizontal solar radiation, the clearness index() and the clearness number() which are required for the use of Liu and Jordan's model and ASHRAE Clear Sky model were derived based on the me...