Performance analysis of liquid desiccant dehumidification systems

Desiccant systems find applications in a very large variety of industrial and daily usage products including the new HVAC installations. An overview of liquid desiccant technology has been presented in this paper along with a compilation of experimental performance data of liquid desiccant dehumidifiers, empirical dehumidification effectiveness and mass transfer correlations in a useful and easy to read tabular format. The latest trends in this area suggest that hybrid systems are of current interest to HVAC industry, not only for high latent load applications but also for improving indoor air quality. The paper presents a comprehensive comparative parametric analysis of packed bed dehumidifiers for three commonly used desiccant materials viz. triethylene glycol, lithium chloride and calcium chloride, using empirical correlations for dehumidification effectiveness from the literature. The analysis reveals significant variations and anomalies in trends between the predictions by various correlations for the same operating conditions, and highlights the need for benchmarking the performance of desiccant dehumidifiers.