Projected climate change and modern ways of living and working in buildings will have a great impact on the energy needed for cooling. Consequently, free cooling technologies are becoming increasingly appealing solutions, such as evaporative cooling, the efficiency of which is greatly impacted by the climate in which they are implemented. In this thesis, a review of free cooling technologies with ventilation, sorption, and evaporative cooling of air was made, as well as parametric models that give estimated air temperatures achievable with the use of these systems, based on the national weather database. Then, selected systems were modeled in a BIM environment They were connected with a thermal response of the building. Algorithms for their control were developed. Energy savings and the ability to ensure thermal comfort were investigated in the example of a modern office building in three European climates in the cities of Ljubljana, Edinburg, and Thessaloniki. It was discovered that the efficiency and potential of these systems are greatly impacted by the climate in which they are implemented. In Ljubljana and especially in Thessaloniki the use of evaporative cooling technologies can cause energy saving while in Edinburg the use of these kinds of systems is not suitable. While dehumidification of air before evaporation caused big energy savings in Thessaloniki, the use of dehumidification – based on our method of modeling – did not bring any noticeable savings.
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