Abstract
Membrane-based total heat exchangers are devices to recover both sensible heat and latent heat from the exhaust air. The performances of exchangers assembled with different structures and membranes vary dramatically. To investigate performances, five modules are fabricated for comparison. A test rig is built to measure the performance of these total heat exchangers. The heat and moisture transfer in the cores are studied simultaneously. These cores can be divided into two categories: with different structures and with different membranes. For the first category, parallel-plates, plate-fins and cross-corrugated structures are used. For the second category, three kinds of membranes, i.e. one-step hand-made CA membrane, hydrophobic-hydrophilic composite membrane and machine-made CA membrane are used. The heat and mass transfer coefficients, sensible cooling and latent effectiveness are obtained through experimental measurements. The experimental results show that the cross-corrugated ducts can enhance heat and mass transfer effectively. And the one-step hand-made CA membrane has the lowest resistance in heat and moisture transfer.
Highlights
Southern China and other Southeast Asia countries have a long summer season with a daily average temperature of 30 ̊C, and humidity ratio above 0.020kg/kg
The energy consumption of air conditioning system is up to 50%-60% among the commercial construction energy consumptions, and energy used to cool and dehumidify the ventilation air ranges from 20%-40% of the energy consumption for air conditioning [1, 2]
It is well known that energy recovery devices could save a large part of energy since heat and humidity would be recovered from the exhaust stream in winter, and excess heat and moisture would be transferred to the exhaust in summer
Summary
Southern China and other Southeast Asia countries have a long summer season with a daily average temperature of 30 ̊C, and humidity ratio above 0.020kg/kg. Since the energy recovery capacity is limited for they can just recover the sensible heat, it is not quite suitable to fulfill this task. Rotary wheels should be more suitable for this task since they can recover both sensible heat and latent heat, which are. For these reasons, membrane-based total heat exchangers have caught much attention. In place of traditional metal heat exchange plates, many kinds of thin membranes, which can transfer both heat and moisture simultaneously, are used as the transfer media and fabricated into different structures [6]. The other is constructed with different membranes, one-step hand-made cellulose acetate
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