Experimental investigation on the thermal and flow performance of a thermodynamically-balanced packed bed humidification system

Abstract

In this paper, a packed bed humidification system filled with corrugated wire mesh was experimentally investigated to obtain a better humidification performance. To thermodynamically balance the simultaneous heat and mass transfer process, multiple water injection bypasses were fabricated at different packing heights based on the entropy generation minimization method. In addition to the inlet water temperature, the influences of the liquid–gas ratio and injection ratio on the humidification capacity, energy effectiveness, and pressure drop were respectively studied and discussed. The experimental and comparison results demonstrated that the established humidification device was robust and superior. It was summarized that raising the number of injections can significantly elevate the humidification capacity, and synchronously magnify the pressure drop for all the cases, while the effectiveness behaved a reverse trend. Additionally, a higher value of the inlet water temperature could increase the humidification capacity and effectiveness, as well as the pressure drop. And, an elevation amplitude of the humidification capacity emerged as 35.51% for the double water injections with a maximum value of 1.48 × 10−2 kgs−1 once the liquid–gas ratio increased from 1 to 1.36, while the value was 39.13% as the injection ratio raised from 0.33 to 0.7. Furthermore, it was illustrated that increasing the mass flow rate of the liquid will reduce the effectiveness when the heat capacity rate ratio is larger than 1, and the effectiveness can reach 0.97 at Twi = 70 °C. In the process of thermodynamic balancing, the increase in the pressure drop of humid air should receive more attention for the designer and researcher related to the packed bed humidifier.