Abstract
Membrane heat exchanger is one of the main components of green HVAC systems. Performance of a thin-membrane heat exchanger has been examined for different membrane materials. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approach was utilized to conduct the current study. The CFD model consisted of a single channel for hot stream and another channel for cold stream. Four membranes were investigated: 45 gsm and 60 gsm Kraft paper, modified cellulose acetate membrane and PVA/LiCl blend membrane. Obtained values of thermal effectiveness at typical HVAC system conditions showed that different membrane materials produced different thermal performance values. The amount of energy recovered from the modified cellulose acetate membrane heat exchanger was the highest. Finally, heat exchanger performance is found to be very sensitive to ambient air relative humidity variation.
Highlights
Indoor air quality of commercial buildings has become a great concern for the air conditioning industry when combined with energy efficiency
The current computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code worked on reproducing the experimental work of Nasif [4] and the result of this comparison is shown by Figure 3
The presented experimental data were labeled as K45 with square dots in Figure 6b and the curves are the results of the CFD simulations
Summary
Indoor air quality of commercial buildings has become a great concern for the air conditioning industry when combined with energy efficiency. Highly humid inlet air conditions could affect the estimation of moisture transported quantities, performance of the heat exchanger and amount of energy recovered. Al-Waked et al [1, 8, 9, 15, 16, 26, 27] performed detailed investigations on modelling and simulating heat and moisture transfer across porous membranes inside a Z-shape and other configurations heat exchangers. They reported that outdoor conditions had minor effects on the simulated heat exchanger performance They stressed that CFD is an efficient design tool that could assist in designing and manufacturing energy recovery systems under different flow configurations, operating conditions and material properties
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