Use of liquid desiccant cooling to improve the performance of vapor compression air conditioning

A hybrid air conditioning system, which consists of sections of desiccant dehumidification, evaporative cooling and vapor compression air conditioning, has been established in this paper. Experimental investigation demonstrates that cooling production and COP of the new hybrid system can be increased significantly, if they are compared with those of vapor compression system (VCS) alone. Assuming that the outlet temperature and humidity of the system are constant, psychrometric analysis at ARI conditions has been conducted under three different cases. The benefits are represented by lower electricity consumption of the compressor, higher COP of the system, less flow rate of condensation air, and reduced size of VCS, etc. The reason that the hybrid system is superior in performance to conventional systems lies in that desiccant dehumidification and evaporative cooling changes the inlet states of the air entering into VCS. Furthermore, the effects of dehumidification and evaporative cooling are analyzed in the paper. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.