Thermal performance improvement of AHP using corrugated heat exchanger by dip-coating method with mass recovery

Abstract

This study focuses on the adsorption heat pump cooling performance enhancement. The corrugated heat exchanger (HEX) has been employed in recent years owing to its excellent heat transfer; however, its filling method require improvement. Therefore, a filling method called dip-coating method is introduced to improve its heat transfer and packing density. The dip-coating method is adapted to accommodate the Wakkanai siliceous shale composite adsorbent, and two types of adsorbent filled-HEX (ad-HEX), i.e., the dip-HEX and dip-filled-HEX, are compared with the conventional ad-HEX of the filled-HEX. The dip-HEX comprises a few mass transfer channels and has a packing density similar to that of the filled-HEX. Meanwhile, the dip-filled-HEX exhibits a 30% higher packing density compared with the filled-HEX. A basic performance experiment is performed, and the results indicate that the dip-HEX outperforms the filled-HEX owing to its higher coefficient of performance (COP) and specific cooling power (SCP). The dip-filled-HEX exhibits a slightly lower SCP than the filled-HEX; however, it exhibits the highest COP among three types of ad-HEXs. Subsequently, mass recovery is applied to enhance the cooling performance. In a typical mass recovery period of 10 s, the COP and SCP of the dip-HEX increases to 0.46 and 0.74 W/g, respectively.