Modern large commercial buildings, such as factories, hotels, office buildings and hospitals, frequently use large and complex heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment.
It is known to equip commercial buildings with variable air volume systems, which are capable of meeting the entire cooling and heating requirements of the building. Within the building, there are likely to be located a number of terminal units in different zones throughout the building, each connected via duct work to a central air supply. Such terminal units are sized to meet the conditions of the space which each serves, but, as a result, multiple offices, rooms or compartments within the structure are necessarily supplied with heating and cooling air by one terminal unit.
The end result of this type of design is that individual rooms or compartments within a structure are forced to share a common heating and cooling environment. While this may represent nothing more than a minor inconvenience for many building occupants in most cases, it presents particular difficulties in some specific environments, for example, hospital operating rooms.
Precise control of temperature and humidity in hospital operating rooms is important. Such rooms are frequently equipped with a number of machines which generate substantial heat. Further, the rooms will be populated with a varying number of workers during a typical operative procedure. Further, operating rooms must be regularly reconfigured for different procedures, meaning that the equipment and personnel contained within the room will vary substantially from day to day.
Under these circumstances, it is extremely difficult to maintain desired, consistent temperature and humidity levels in specific areas within buildings where centralized heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems are in use.
While it is known to install modular heating, ventilating and air conditioning systems in individual rooms and compartments, many such devices are inefficient, cumbersome to install, and take up substantial space in the room in which they are installed. Further, such stand alone units are not centrally located within the rooms or compartments which they are designed to service, resulting in an imbalance in temperature and humidity in different areas of the same room or compartment. Further, such self-contained units often recirculate, rather than vent room air. Such units sometimes are in conflict in operation with the building central heating, ventilating and air conditioning system, resulting in energy inefficiencies when a local modular unit attempts to heat the air within a particular room or compartment at the same time as the centralized heating, ventilating and air conditioning system is attempting to cool the very same space.
It is desirable, therefore, to implement a modular heating, cooling and humidifying system which works in concert with the centralized heating, ventilating and air conditioning system of a larger structure, and which can be placed within the air ducting system of an existing structure, allowing individual temperature and humidity control in a single compartment or room, while at the same time not occupying physical space within the room or compartment, and further operating in symbiosis with the central heating, ventilating and air conditioning system of the structure.