Performance characteristics of a novel internally-cooled plate membrane liquid desiccant air dehumidification system

Abstract An air dehumidification system with internally-cooled plate membrane-based liquid desiccant dehumidifier is presented. The novel system can effectively dehumidify the ambient air by the internally-cooled dehumidifier. On the other hand, the dehumidifier and regenerator are in independent operation due to the separate solution passage, which makes the system more flexible and energy saving. In this research, heat and mass transfer processes in the dehumidifier, the regenerator, the air-cooled water chiller, and other key components are modeled in detail. Based on these sub-models, the whole system model is established and solved. An experiment is carried out to validate the theoretical model and the calculated results agree with the experimental data well. The impacts of main operating parameters on the system performance (e.g. specific dehumidification power, coefficient of performance and dehumidification) are investigated numerically. The results show that the specific dehumidification power of the system at design condition reaches 263 g h-1 m-2, which indicates that the system gets strong dehumidification capacity. The COP of the whole system is in the range of 0.46-0.62 and energy consumption for regeneration occupies above 60% of total energy input.