Good afternoon all,

This week’s meeting was short but was necessary to update Morgan on the progress made over the past three weeks and to determine the next steps to be taken. To catch everyone up I have attached all of my findings for information on the chilled water loops. A quick summary of what I discovered is that the vet med chiller plant is on a separate loop because of how far it is from other campus buildings. In its loop it has 5 different buildings it provides chilled water to. The other 6 chiller plants are all connected in the main chilled water loop. The loop consists of about 115 different campus buildings and they can be seen in the document. The buildings found in this loop were found by sorting the utilities billing information by chilled water vendor. The five chiller plants on the main loop also have the capability to isolate themselves from the main loop and provide certain buildings with chilled water. This list can also be found in the document.

I then read through the BIF’s plumbing materials list to see if it had any information on low flow fixtures. I found out that for some of the listed items like the lavatories in the description says “max flow 0.5 GPM in compliance with energy policy act of 1992 and ASME/ANSI standard A112.18.1M.” We do not know if it has all the listed fixtures and will have to continue looking into other building plumbing lists.

Besides researching I also created a rough water audit plan for campus buildings. This will be a very intensive process as most water audits need to test every water fixture to get the actual flow rates of them. The first part of the audit will be reviewing data on each building to see the history of water consumption. Next the billing and metered water will be compared to see if there is a loss of water. After the data collection and comparison is complete auditors will walk through the building to see if there are any visible leaks and test each water fixtures actual flow rate. The flow rate will be recorded and used to compare each building against each other to see which will but retro fitted first based on most water consumption.

For this upcoming week I will be researching and creating more questions to ask about the chiller plants and low flow water fixtures. We will try to plan meetings or phone calls with other knowledgeable people to see if they have information that can help our progress and clarify any questions we have. I will also be creating a checklist that can be given to interns or workers on how to perform the walk through part of the water audit and finding vendors that can sell us the tools needed to determine flow rates of different water fixture.

Thank You,
Austin Jung

Good afternoon all,

There was no week 4 update because of some time conflicts which lead to the cancelation of the meeting. This week proceeded normally and we recapped what happened for week 4 and continued progress forward on determining what data is needed for the chiller plants to determine their efficiencies and line losses. To keep everyone up to date last week I was able to email three different combined heat and power plants, they were in London, Helsinki, and Copenhagen. They either did not get back to me or told me to review what is on their site because no further information can be released. After reviewing all of their sites, I was still not able to find more information on water consumption of CHPs or how it is monitored. I also emailed Ashlynn Stillwell who is a professor here at UIUC and has done research on water consumption. She was able to give me some helpful sources to find industry standards on energy, fuel, and water consumption of all power plants.

In this week’s meeting we reviewed the excel spread sheet I created to determine what data would need to be collected for our analysis of the chiller plants. We came to the conclusion that the water makeup (potable water) for each chiller plant, total Water Chilled at each chiller plant, energy used at each chiller plant, and total chilled water metered from buildings in the loop. With this data the cooling and energy efficiencies can be determined along with the line losses.

For next week’s meeting we will be trying to figure out who to contact to determine which buildings have been retro fitted with the new low flow water fixtures and which have not yet. I will also be continuing my research on CHPs and reading into the master utilities plan. After reviewing the excel sheet I am going to make some edits to prepare it for when get our data. Thanks for keeping up and I will be back next week.

Best,

Austin Jung

Good morning all,

Austin here and yesterday’s meeting with Morgan White and Sarthak Prasad went well. I reviewed articles on how power plants use freshwater and the ways to reduce their consumption. The biggest factor in water use at power plants is their cooling system. The metric for measuring this is gallon per KWh and it’s categorized by their withdrawal, consumption, and discharge. The different types of cooling systems have their own pros and cons. For example wet recirculating cooling is good because it doesn’t withdrawal a lot of water but it consumes more than the other methods. Then an example of an advanced cooling system is a hybrid system that used air and a cooling tower to combine the advantages of a cooling tower and the resourcefulness of using a dry system. The draw backs of using only air is it makes the thermal conversion efficiency go down and increases operational costs. More details can be found in the attached file.

We proceeded to continue research on how our power plant and chiller plants operate by looking at the water and energy consumption of the billing logs. We plan on meeting with Mike next week to gain more insight on the chiller plants and their water consumption. Then we looked at the piping layouts for the Universities potable and cooling water pipelines.

To further our research I will finish reviewing some more articles on cooling tower water consumption. Then find articles with more detail on how cogeneration plants work and what metrics are used to measure their energy and water consumption. There should be more data on this from different European studies because they have similar systems like ours at Abbott. Lastly I will familiarize myself with our systems by researching the chiller plants and Abbott information given on the Facility & Services webpage.

Thanks,
Austin Jung

Each team shared ideas of the semester and came together to propose a few joint recommendations. Suggested logistics for a water audit were mentioned, as well as nitrate runoff data from the 1990s that would be used as benchmark levels for runoff reduction. Different possible measuring techniques regarding future progress in nitrate reduction were mentioned. Ideas for greener parking lots were introduced, including replanting of trees on Lot E14.

The team reviewed projects from 2016-17 and discussed potential student projects to carry out the objectives to inventory landscape performance, investigate water quality impacts of stormwater runoff, and performing a water audit.