Radiant cooling systems (RCS) are gaining acceptance as a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) solution for achieving adequate thermal comfort and maintaining acceptable indoor air quality inside buildings. RCS are well known for their energy-saving potential; however, serious condensation problem hinders the growth of this technology. In order to prevent the risk of condensation, the supply water temperature is kept higher than the dew point temperature of the air inside the room. The full potential of the cooling power of a radiant cooling panel is limited. Therefore, this article is on maximizing the cooling capacity of a radiant cooling panel, in terms of flow configuration. Radiant cooling panels (RCP) with different chilled water pipe configurations are designed and compared, side by side with the conventional serpentine flow configuration. The cooling performance of the radiant cooling panels is evaluated by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with Ansys Fluent software (Ansys 2020 R2, PA, USA). Under similar flow and operating conditions, the common serpentine flow configuration exhibits the least effective cooling performance, with the highest pressure drop across the pipe. It is concluded that the proposed designs have the potential of improving the overall efficiency of RCP in terms of temperature distribution, cooling capacity, and pressure drop.

Radiant cooling systems are commonly applied in commercial applications because of their energy-saving potential. This potential can be further enhanced by evaluating the cooling performance of the radiant cooling panel in terms of flow configurations. Although studies have been conducted on the flow configurations of the radiant cooling panel, the most suitable flow configurations have yet to be determined. The conventional serpentine flow configuration does not bring out the best cooling performance of the radiant cooling panel, therefore different flow configurations are still needed to be explored. This study conducted a quick literature review on the different radiant cooling systems as well as radiant cooling panel with different chilled water pipe configurations. The objective of this review is to provide a brief comparison of the performance of radiant cooling panel with different chilled water pipe configurations and to suggest further studies for the system development. The cooling characteristics and heat transfer of the panel are investigated by using numerical study. A comparison between the designs of flow configurations is presented. In all of the cases, the plate area and flow volume are fixed. Based on the findings obtained, applying a different chilled water pipe configuration on the radiant cooling panel will affect the flow uniformity and also the temperature distribution uniformity. An optimized flow configurations for the radiant cooling panel is important for enhancing the overall efficiency of the system.