Cooling Coil Selection for Hot, Humid Climates

by Stephen C. Turner
Senior Scientist, Chelsea Group, Ltd.

Designers specifying coils for hot, humid climates face special challenges. Inadequate
peak-load capacity, improper part-load moisture removal, moisture blow-by, and
premature fin deterioration are often seen. These conditions lead to indoor air quality
problems and higher operation and maintenance costs. Correct and complete coil
solutions go beyond row numbers or coil depth, and are only obtained from thorough
analysis.

Manufacturer coil selection software often does not convey sufficient information to
ensure adequate performance. Manufacturers focus on cost and related physical factors:
frontal coil area, aspect ratio of coil face, fin type, fin thickness, fin spacing, tube type,
tube wall thickness, tube spacing, and connection arrangement. Some manufacturers now
offer coils with fewer rows and turbulence inducing fins, claiming the same performance
as conventional coils with more rows. Concerns about these designs are many: water
entrained off the trailing fin edges of shallow coils may promote microbial growth in air
handling equipment, this water may re-evaporate raising supply air humidity, coil
cleaning may present special problems, and higher local velocities may promote fin
erosion and corrosion (a problem even with standard coils in coastal areas).

The applications professional faced with coil selection has an additional set of primary
concerns: space constraints, air side performance, chilled water or refrigerant side
performance, maintenance considerations, availability, installation cost, and operating
expense. Rather than focus on physical attributes, this article focuses on coil
performance qualities determined by these attributes. This article analyzes coil selection
and reviews psychrometric principles using data from West Palm Beach, Florida, to
illustrate the problems encountered when selecting coils for use in hot, humid climates.

The Basics

The selection of coils for hot, humid climates focuses on air side performance issues,
primarily moisture removal capability. Certain choices are apparent: row-split instead of
face-split configurations for part-load moisture control, deeper coils with fewer fins per
inch for better cleaning access, and counter-flow connections for humidity control. But
the coil performance characteristic central to moisture removal is the bypass factor,
which quantifies the fraction of air that passes through a coil unaltered.
All the air passing through a coil does not make contact with the metal surface. In
addition to the boundary layer effect, the available surface of a specific coil affects its
heat transfer effectiveness. Fewer rows or fins per inch, smaller face area, wider row
spacing: all of these increase the amount of air which passes through the coil unaltered.
Such modifications result in higher bypass factor values.

The complement of the bypass factor is the contact factor, the fraction of air leaving the
apparatus at the apparatus dew point. The apparatus dew point is typically found on the
psychrometric chart provided by the equipment’s manufacturer as the point where the
system's total sensible heat factor line intersects the saturation curve bounding the upper
left side of the chart. This total sensible heat factor line represents the ratio of the
system's sensible heat load to the total system heat load, sensible and latent, including
outdoor air and all other loads. As a guide, apparatus dew point for roomconditions of
75°F (24°C) dry bulb with 50% to 60% relative humidity typically range from 50°F to
55°F (10°C to 13°C). Since apparatus dew point is a saturated value, it is both the dry
and wet bulb temperature. In the absence of coil data, required bypass factor can be
calculated. (See Figure 2.1.)

Changing the amount of available coil surface has a greater impact on bypass factor than
changing the velocity of the air passing through it.1 Reducing air velocity through the
coil by field adjustment of blower drive pulleys can impair ventilation effectiveness. It is
unwise to select a high bypass factor coil on the assumption that humidity control can be
improved through velocity reduction after installation. A low bypass factor also permits
the use of face and bypass dampers to modulate the amount of bypass air in accordance
with operating conditions.

An Example: West Palm Beach, Florida

Figure 2.2, is a representation of a 5 ton air-conditioning process at design conditions for

West Palm Beach, Florida, on a psychrometric chart.2 Outside air is brought in at
ASHRAE’s 5% design conditions of 91°F (33°C) dry bulb, 78°F (26°C) mean coincident
wet bulb. Room conditions are targeted at 75°F (24°C) dry bulb, 60% relative humidity.
Indoor relative humidity levels of 50% are not practically attainable with standard
equipment and without reheat in southern Florida. Outside air is brought in at a rate of
400 cubic feet per minute (190 liters per second) and is mixed with 1600 cfm (755 l/s) of
return air before the cooling coil. An apparatus dew point of 55°F (13°C) is assumed. A
conventional 4 row coil with 8 fins per inch and a bypass factor of 0.28, typical for a
stock fan-coil unit, is analyzed. Modest fan reheat is figured in addition to the space and
outdoor air loads. Heat gain in ductwork is ignored. This example confirms our earlier
equation for the bypass factor of 0.28.
Note: Despite the imposing number of curves and crisscrossing lines, the psychrometric chart is
easy to use. It displays the relationship between four properties of air: dry bulb temperature
(vertical lines), wet bulb temperature (lines sloping gently downward to the right), dew point
temperature (horizontal lines), and relative humidity (the only curves on the chart). Given any two
of these properties for the air being described, the other two can be determined using the chart.
The chart’s usefulness lies beyond the mere representation of these elementary properties — for
any state of air, it also describes the air’s moisture content (far right scale), energy content (outer
diagonal scale on upper left), specific volume (lines sloping sharply downward to the right), and
more. The chart provides an accurate, convenient alternative to cumbersome tables or equations.
In addition, it provides a graphic representation of system operation. Here, the air’s statepoints as
it passes through the air-conditioning system and room can be followed counterclockwise around
four points: Mix, Leaving Coil, Supply, and Room.
Analysis

Two processes in the charted example are particularly important. The first reveals the
impact of bypass factor on moisture control. The bypass air must be cooled and
dehumidified down to the interior design conditions as part of the “room effect”. Hence
the room effect isnot limited to the warming of air stream and addition of moisture by
internal loads. The air mixture enters the coil at 78°F (26°C) dry bulb and 68°F (20°C)
wet bulb. With the bypass factor of 0.28, twenty-eight percent of the outside air passes
through the coil and enters the conditioned space unchanged. The latent load this bypass
air adds to space loads is, in this analysis, approximately 3315 British thermal units per
hour (0.971 kilowatts) of latent load. As in many applications, this is augmented only by
infiltration and the 105 Btu/hr (30.8 watts) per person attributable to occupants. This
analysis assumes ten occupants, for a total of 1050 Btu/hr (0.308 kW) latent load due to
occupants. Bypass air introduces moist air directly to the occupied space. It affects
room conditions in the same way as uncontrolled airflow, infiltration, and internal
moisture sources. It can defeat humidity control efforts and lead to air quality problems.

The second point shows how outdoor air loads can prevent an otherwise satisfactory
system from proper performance. The capacity available to offset the room effect is the
system's total minus the amount required to cool and dehumidify the unbypassed outside
air stream from its outside conditions all the way to its conditions as it leaves the coil.
The simplest way to estimate this for the coil selection process is to use an estimated
apparatus dew point of 55°F (13°C). Here, this procedure yields an estimated load from
outside air of almost 20,000 Btu/hr (5.86 kW). The available capacity of our 5 ton (17.6
kW), 2000 cfm (945 l/s) air handler has been slashed by a third, from 60,000 Btu/hr
(17.6 kW) to about 40,000 Btu/hr (11.7 kW). Outside air loads on conventional unitary
equipment or built-up systems not suited to hot, humid climate applications can
overwhelm otherwise properly sized systems.

Conclusions

Equipment sized to 5 cfm (2.4 l/s) per person outside air (mandated by Florida’s State
Energy Efficiency Code throughout the 1980s), modified to comply with ASHRAE 62-
1989 at 20 cfm (9.4 l/s) for typical offices can easily be overwhelmed. Proper redesign to
handle higher outside air loads must include psychrometric analysis of both peak
conditions (as presented here) and off-peak conditions to ensure proper moisture control.
For new systems, selecting coils for systems with higher outside air requirements for
applications in the sub-tropics and tropics is difficult. For existing systems, these
challenges may be insurmountable without creative and/or drastic measures.

There is no hard and fast rule to proper coil selection for hot, humid climates. Often the
right coil for the job isn't what is in stock, or even what the manufacturer's coil selection
software kicks out. Sometimes the solution can't even be found solely in the coil
selection. However, a thorough analysis of coil selection for the job at hand frequently
points the way to the whole solution.

References
1
Carrier Air Conditioning Company, Carrier System Design Manual, Carrier
Corporation, 1960.
2
Based on image generated with Action Psychrometrics software release 1.04,
Sunshine Technologies, Boulder, Colorado.
3
American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air-Conditioning Engineers ,
1993 ASHRAE Handbook, Fundamentals. ch. 6.
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