Abstract
Demand of air cooling is on-rise due to global warming and increasing population, especially in developing countries, like Pakistan. Therefore, it is essential to develop indigenous cost effective solutions utilizing local materials, instead of importing on expansive technologies. Dew point indirect evaporative cooling (DP-IEC) is an energy efficient and low operational cost alternative for space air-cooling especially in the dry and hot climate conditions. The present research represents the experimental analysis of DP-IEC through development of a heat and mass exchanger (HMX) built with localized efficient materials working under actual climate conditions. The HMX is fabricated with polymeric materials ensuring high wettability and low weight to volume ratio. The HMX consists of polypropylene-based 45 channels (22 dry and 23 wet). The design thermal capacity of the system is 1.35 kW at maximum flow rate of air around 200 CFM. The experimental setup is well equipped with related instrumentation and detailed investigations are carried out to evaluate the system performance under wide range of operating conditions like ambient air temperature, air relative humidity, and water temperature. The experimental results showed that the effectiveness of the DP-IEC system has increased with increase of the ambient air temperature and decrease of the relative humidity of air. In addition, the resultant maximum dew point and wet bulb effectiveness are 0.55 and 0.73, respectively. Whereas, coefficient of performance, energy efficiency ratio, and cooling capacity are achieved in range of 7.7–16.3, 26.2–55.7, and 629.9–1339 W, respectively. Thus, the proposed solution with efficient materials has proved viable for domestic cooling applications.
Published Version
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