Sustainable Water-Based Cooling in Megacities

The SWiM is a five-year collaborative project involving Aalborg University (AAU), Aarhus University (AU), Nanyang Technological University (NTU), and Grundfos. The project aims to develop a sustainable and cost-effective cooling system for hot, humid megacities in middle-income countries. This will be realized through the following objectives:
a) Develop integrated cooling strategies for different building typologies and varying cooling demand
b) Develop tools for optimal design, planning, sizing and assessment of cooling demand and supply
c) Enable easy deployment of cooling systems that require minimal skilled labor
d) Develop robust systems resilient to hardware and software faults and with advanced fault detection and diagnostic capabilities
e) Design energy-efficient control strategies for optimal cooling and thermal comfort for building, district and city-wide deployment
f) Achieve optimal control and operation of existing (brownfield) distributed district cooling networks with scalability and improved cost-effectiveness
g) Enable testing, validation and demonstration of system performance and effectiveness through real-world implementation at scale (from room-level to floor-level to building-level)
h) Actively seek collaborations and capacity-building initiatives to further extend the achievements of the project and explore possibilities for eventual large-scale deployment