Abstract
Water scarcity is a significant issue in developing countries and remote locations, however, atmospheric water vapour is a widely available and yet underutilised water reservoir. Desiccant coated heat exchangers are a potential sorption reactor for multicyclic atmospheric water generation due to the enhanced heat and mass transfer to the desiccant. This study utilised a transient one-dimensional mathematical model for a plate-fin desiccant coated heat exchanger and adapted the model for atmospheric water generation. From this, a heat and mass transfer analysis and parametric study were conducted to determine the effect of the operational and geometric parameters on the specific water production and specific energy consumption. The heat and mass transfer analysis found that the coating at the inlet and outlet regions of the channels were underutilised. The parametric study found that the adsorption and desorption cycle times should be optimised independently, the primary air velocity should be high during adsorption and low during desorption, and secondary channel cooling during adsorption did not significantly improve performance. The highest specific water production and the lowest specific energy consumption recorded in this study were 5.8 L kg−1 day−1 and 7.7 MJ L-1 respectively. The recorded specific water production values were higher than most desiccant based atmospheric water generators in the literature. However, the performance was significantly reduced at higher ambient temperatures.
Published Version
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