Liquid Desiccants Applications in Cooling and Dehumidification – An Overview

Abstract

Potential option to replace the traditionally used vapor compression system with desiccant based dehumidification and cooling to overcome the problems in VCR use like as substantial consumption of high grade electrical energy and to eliminate the use of the CFC based refrigerants which are responsible for the depletion of ozone layer. The desiccant cooling can be proved to be an efficient in highly moist atmosphere to handles the latent cooling load of the conditioned space. The present overview explains about the detailed ideas for making use of various chemicals as the desiccant solution for their optimum cost and characteristics. The desiccant cooling can handle both humidity and temperature separately and effectively to produce necessary thermal comfort within the conditioned space. The desiccant cooling can find optimum use of renewable solar energy in air conditioning by applying them for desiccant regeneration to lower the consumption of electricity which produced mostly by fossil fuel based power plants which leads to problem of pollution subsequently. The present review provides the direction for effective use of the desiccant based cooling for separable control over temperature and humidity in case of both residential and industrial use to ameliorate the dual - energy and cost saving.