Investigation of the interface effects and condensation properties of the micro/nanoporous aluminum plates

Abstract

Direct expansion based air conditioning (DX A/C) system is widely used for household dehumidification, but its limited dehumidification capacity hardly meet the people's requirements for comfort and energy conservation. In order to resolve this problem, the micro/nanoporous aluminum plate with low contact angle was prepared by using the anodic oxidation method. By changing the oxidation current, the micro/nanoporous aluminum plates with the pore diameter of 30–400 nm were obtained. Then, the micro/nanoporous aluminum plates were tested and compared with the polished aluminum plate under different temperature and relative humidity conditions. The experimental results showed that when the surface temperature of the aluminum plates was at 5 ℃ and the surrounding relative humidity was at 90%, the average poly-condensation ratio of the micro/micro/nanoporous aluminum plate with pore diameter of 200 nm reached the maximum of 137.4 g/(min m2), while 85.3 g/(min m2) for the polished aluminum plate. The correlation of the average condensation rate of the aluminum plate with the micro/nanoporous diameter under different working conditions was also established in the acceptable error range. The aluminum plate can be applied to the evaporator of the exchanger to enhance the dehumidification property of the air-conditioning system.