Design of a Solar assisted Liquid Desiccant based evaporative Cooler (PDF)

Academic Paper from the year 2017 in the subject Engineering - Power Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, language: English, abstract: The increase of occupant comfort demands are leading to rising requirement for air conditioning, but deteriorating global energy and environment crisis are starving for energy saving and environmental protection. The need to come up with the new energy saving as well as environmental friendly air conditioning systems has been more urgent than ever before. In hot and humid areas, the liquid desiccant air-conditioning systems based on evaporative cooling was proposed as a promising invention.

This system overcomes the difficulty of evaporative cooler increased humidity with cooling, which makes it unsuitable for hot and humid climates, by dehumidifying the air first and then cooling it inside an evaporative cooler with water. The heating effect of dehumidification process is compensated by cooling water circulation. The use of dehumidifier in conjunction with an evaporative cooler increases the efficiency of the system. Some of the advantages of using this system are: it can remove the air latent load, environmental friendly, removes the pollutants from the process air and reduces the amount of the electrical energy consumed.

The primary objective of this project is to design a solar based liquid desiccant evaporative system to purify and supply cool air. Liquid desiccant dehumidification has been proven to be an effective method to extract the moisture of air with relatively less energy consumption, especially compared with conventional vapor compression system. Inside the dehumidifier we used calcium chloride solution which after some period of time gets diluted with water and loses its moisture absorbing capacity and therefore, needs to be heated in the solar collector to ensure that the liquid desiccant does not lose its absorption capacity.

In this project, several different aspects in solar assisted liquid desiccant based evaporative cooler have been considered. Some of these aspects include the availability of the materials, manufacturability of the product, sustainability of the product, health and safety regulations and the environmental effects of the product.