Abstract
A polymer hollow fibre evaporative cooling system with a novel configuration of fibre bundle is proposed. With the aim to avoid the flow channelling or shielding of adjacent fibres the fibres inside each bundle were made into a spindle shape to maximize contact between the air stream and the fibres. For the porous wall of hollow fibre, the vapour of evaporated water can permeate through it effectively, while the liquid water droplets can be prevented from mixing with the processed air. For various dry bulb temperatures (27 °C, 30 °C, 33 °C, 36 °C and 39 °C) and relative humidity (23%, 32% and 40%) of the inlet air, the cooling performances of the proposed novel evaporative cooling system were experimentally investigated. The variations of outlet air dry bulb temperature, wet bulb effectiveness, dew point effectiveness and cooling capacity with respect to different incoming air dry bulb temperature were studied. The effects of various incoming air Reynolds number on the heat and mass transfer coefficients, heat flux and mass flux across the polymer hollow fibre module were analysed. Experimentally derived non-dimensional heat and mass transfer correlations were compared with other correlations from literature. Due to the proposed spindle shape of hollow fibre bundle, the shielding between adjacent fibres could be mitigated greatly, therefore the heat and mass transfer performance of the proposed system demonstrated significant improvement compared with other designs reported in literature.
Highlights
Global energy demand is soaring during past few decades due to the rapid worldwide economy development and urban sprawl
For incoming air temperature in the range of 27-39◦C and the incoming air relative humidity varying from 23%, 32% to 40%, it can be observed that the outlet air temperature is dramatically affected by inlet air relative humidity at constant incoming air temperature
By keeping the inlet air dry bulb temperature at constant value, increase the inlet air relative humidity will lead to the decrease of cooling capacity, wet bulb effectiveness and dew point effectiveness; 2) The heat and mass transfer coefficients remain to be in linear relationships with respect to the Reynolds number, despite of various inlet air relative humidity
Summary
Xiangjie Chen1,3, Yuehong Su1, Devrim Aydin4, Yate Ding1, David Reay2, Richard Law2, Saffa Department of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Nottingham, University Park, NG7 Department of Energy and Power Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Jungong Road No 516, Shanghai, 200031, China Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eastern Mediterranean University, G. Magosa, TRNC
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