Air coolers to help NDP audience beat the heat
Outdoor cooling innovation made in Singapore by ST Engineering and SP Group for National Day Parade will be launched at the NDP Preview show on July 29, 2017. Photo taken on July 27, 2017. Photo: Esther Leong/ TODAY
SINGAPORE — For the first time at next month’s National Day Parade, about 30 air coolers will be set up at the venue to give some spectators a bit of relief from the heat.
Four sets of coolers will be stationed at the front audience sections (112 seats) to be occupied by those with special needs, and the rest will be placed along areas where queues are expected to form, such as at collection points for the goodie bags and at security checkpoints where tighter screening is expected this year.
They will be used for the parade on August 9 as well as for the preview show this Saturday (July 29), both held at the Marina Bay Floating Platform, which has a seating capacity of 25,000.
The initiative is a collaboration between government-linked defence and engineering group Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering) and energy company SP Group.
The Airbitat Smart Coolers, each about 1.4m tall, projects cool air to an area of up to 25sqm.
It relies on an outdoor cooling system and functions using chilled water that runs from an underground district cooling plant at Marina Bay. The water typically goes through pipes to provide air-conditioning for buildings in the district, and some of the used water will be sent to a heat exchanger near the floating platform, and then to the air coolers through connected pipes to emerge as cool air streams at 24°C.
Mr Jimmy Khoo, 55, managing director of Singapore District Cooling, a subsidiary of SP Group, said that this saves 90 per cent in energy consumption compared to electricity-powered cooling devices.
Mr Gareth Tang, 37, general manager of Innosparks, an open laboratory of ST Engineering which developed the coolers, said that in using this system, each cooler costs 15 cents an hour to run, which is “10 times cheaper than conventional air conditioning”.
“If you run it for eight hours, from the morning to the evening, it only costs about a dollar,” he added.
While Airbitat Smart Coolers are also found at the entrance of the Singapore Zoo and the taxi stand at Resorts World Sentosa, those produce cool air within their own systems and operate at 35 cents per hour. They are also larger in size due to the in-built chilled-water generator in each of them.
Next month, as part of a commercial deal, ST Engineering will be putting up 12 air coolers at the courtyard in dining and nightspot venue, Chijmes.
