COOLING AND DEHUMIDIFICATION PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF INTERNALLY-COOLED LIQUID DESICCANT ABSORBERS

A heat and mass transfer performance analysis of an internally-cooled liquid desiccant absorber (ICLDA) is presented in this paper. For this purpose, a two dimensional steady state model is developed and solved numerically to predict the cooling and dehumidification performance o f an ICLDA. Several important performance parameters which strongly in fluence the performance of an ICLDA are identified in this study. Base d on the NTU-effectiveness methodology, an easy-to-use performance pre diction model of an ICLDA is also developed in this work. The easy-to- use model can be utilized to estimate the annual energy requirements o f an ICLDA using an hour-by-hour analysis. Finally, the total load and latent load removal performance as predicted by the model in this wor k is compared with the easy-to-use model predictions as well as catalo g performance data for some commercially available ICLDAs. (C) 1998 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.