Analysis of Heat Source System Degradation Due to Aging and Evaluation of Its Effect on Energy Consumption

The performance of air conditioning systems deteriorate due to the natural aging and wear caused by operating the devices. This is termed “aging degradation,” and it results from a lack of appropriate maintenance which accelerates the degree of performance degradation. The performance degradation of an air conditioning system can cause problems such as increased energy consumption, deteriorated indoor heating environment, and shortened lifespan of air conditioning equipment. To prevent such problems, it is important to establish a long-term maintenance plan to recover degraded performance, such as predicting an appropriate maintenance time by identifying the real-time performance degradation rate based on a system’s operation data. In this study, the performance degradation rate, according to the operating time, was estimated using long-term operation data for devices constituting a heat source system, and the effect of performance degradation of the heat source system’s operation and energy consumption was reviewed using a simulation. The performance degradation rate of the target device was estimated by analyzing the variation trend of the calibration coefficient, which was calculated when the initial performance prediction model was calibrated through operating data. Using this approach, it was confirmed that the annual performance degradation rate was 1.0–1.4% for the heat source equipment, 0.4–1.2% for the cooling towers, and 0.8–1.3% for the pumps. In addition, a heat source system energy simulation calculated the 15-year performance degradation of the heat source equipment to be 34–52% and 7–19% for both the cooling towers and pumps. Due to the equipment performance deterioration, the number of operating heat source equipment and cooling tower fans, and the pump flow rate gradually increased every year, thus accelerating the performance deterioration even further. As a result, energy consumption in the 15th year increased by approximately 41% compared with the initial energy consumption.