Experimentally evaluation of split air conditioner integrated with humidification-dehumidification desalination unit for better thermal comfort, produce freshwater, and energy saving

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The present experimental study aims to achieve the better indoor thermal comfort, produce freshwater, and energy saving. To investigate this idea, split air conditioner was integrated with solar assisted humidification-dehumidification (HDH) desalination unit, the HDH desalination unit was designed to produce the freshwater and also used as a pre-cooling unit to cool the condenser of split air conditioner in order to reduce a power consumption, increases the cooling capacity, and COP. To obtain the effect of utilizing the HDH desalination unit as pre-cooling unit on a performance of the split air conditioner, two operating cases were suggested to run the HDH unit and the split air conditioner. In the first operating case, the HDH unit was operated separately from the air conditioner. In the second operating case, the HDH unit was connected to the condenser of air conditioner to cool the condenser. Is this case the cold air leaving from the dehumidifier of the HDH desalination unit was used to cool the condenser of the split air conditioner. The results show that when the HDH desalination unit combined with the split air conditioner, (i) the saving in power consumption of air conditioner reached 18.4%, (ii) COP for the air conditioner improved by 48.5%, (iii) accumulative freshwater production reached 36.49 L day−1, and (iv) the improvement in GOR for utilizing the proposed hybrid system reached 60.9%.