A NOVEL APPROACH TO AIR CONDITIONING VIA DECOUPLED LATENT AND SENSIBLE COOLING

Abstract

Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems account for 50% of a building’s energy consumption. In order to reduce the energy demand for air conditioning, efforts have been made to develop energy-efficient cooling systems. For hot and humid climate, decoupling the latent and sensible heat loads of the air has become a popular method. In this thesis, a novel approach to air conditioning via membrane liquid desiccant dehumidification (MLDD) and dew point evaporative cooling (DPEC) is proposed. The performance of both cross-flow and counter-flow dew point evaporative coolers is investigated. Concurrently, both lumped parameter and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models are formulated to simulate the transient and steady-state performance of the coolers. Subsequently, a more in-depth theoretical study of DPEC is carried out, including scaling, dimensional, heat and mass transfer and exergy analysis. Finally, the hybrid dehumidification and cooling system is developed. The proposed system incorporates the newly-developed hollow-fiber/flat-plate MLDD technologies.