Impact of Intake and Exhaust Ducts on the Recovery Efficiency of Heat Recovery Ventilation Systems

Tom Marsik, Riley Bickford, Conor Dennehy, Robbin Garber-Slaght, Jeremy Kasper

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

3 Scopus Citations

Abstract

The heat recovery efficiency of ventilation systems utilizing heat recovery ventilators (HRVs) depends not only on the heat recovery efficiency of the HRV units themselves but also on the intake and exhaust ducts that connect the HRV units to the outside environment. However, these ducts are often neglected in heat loss calculations, as their impact on the overall heat recovery efficiency of HRV systems is often not understood and, to the knowledge of the authors, a mathematical model for the overall heat recovery efficiency of HRV systems that accounts for these ducts has not been published. In this research, a mathematical model for the overall heat recovery efficiency of HRV systems that accounts for the intake and exhaust ducts was derived and validated using real-life data. The model-predicted decrease in heat recovery efficiency due to the ducts was in reasonable agreement (relative error within 20%) with the real-life measurements. The results suggest that utilizing this model allows for more correct ventilation heat loss calculations compared to using the heat recovery efficiency of the HRV unit alone, but more field studies are needed to verify the accuracy of this model in a wide range of applications.

Original languageAmerican English
Article number351
Number of pages10
JournalEnergies
Volume14
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

NREL Publication Number

  • NREL/JA-5600-78834

Keywords

  • Ducts
  • Heat recovery ventilator (HRV)
  • Recovery efficiency

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