A comment on the concept of entransy (versus exergy) for the performance assessment of a desiccant cooling system

The utility of entransy is considered for the performance assessment of an experimental desiccant cooling system, DCS in comparison with the energy and exergy analyses. An increase in the regeneration temperature T-R is associated with a decrease in the sensible coefficient of performance COP which has a measurement range of 0.2 <= COP <= 1.3. The calculated magnitude of COP and system exergetic efficiency, eta(DCS) is 0.345 and 3.3% respectively. The desiccant wheel, DW has the greatest percentage of the total exergy destruction of DCS. Therefore an entransy effectiveness parameter of DW, epsilon(DW,ENTRANSY) is introduced. This parameter expresses the sensible cooling capacity, CC as a ratio of heat input Q and the regeneration entransy stored in DW, E-DW,E-R. epsilon(DW,ENTRANSY) can be used as an alternative performance parameter since the dependence of epsilon(DW,ENTRANSY) on T-R is the same of COP. There exists an acceptable conformity between the calculated magnitudes of epsilon(DW,ENTRANSY) and eta(DCS). The cited similarity between the application of entransy and entropy generation is verified for the discussed case. However entransy is of considerable practical importance for the performance analysis of heat transfer processes. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.