Impacts of water storage on robust optimal design of cooling system considering uncertainty

Abstract Uncertainties of cooling load may make cooling system oversized. Most of previous studies implement probabilistic-based uncertainty analysis, intending to achieve optimization and reliability simultaneously. However, how to reduce the load uncertainty has received little attention. This paper investigates the impact of water storage on the design of cooling system considering load uncertainty. Information entropy is used as a convergence index of load uncertainty and used to determine how many random simulations should to be performed. A cooling system configured with water storage (system B) and another system without water storage (system A as a comparation system) are investigated in this paper. In this paper, the configure of system A and system B are optimized respectively. The result shows that the capacity distribution of system A is consistent with the distribution of extreme loads. But, the capacity distribution of system B is more concentrated as the water storage can reshape the load curve. Water storage improves the flexibility of system B. Therefore, system B is more reliable and economical than system A.