Desiccant-based dehumidification and direct/indirect evaporative cooling technologies

Desiccant cooling systems are energy efficient and allow a better indoor air quality. Desiccant dehumidification is profitable in handling latent heat, easy to be reactivated with low-grade energy, like solar energy and waste heat, etc. The exploitation of heat produced by solar thermal collectors is a motivating option for thermal driven Desiccant cooling air conditioning processes. It is a good solution to guarantee less environmental impact. Desiccant cooling systems have two air streams. The first stream is the process air delivered to conditioned space, and the second stream is the reactivation air used to regenerate desiccant material. For this reason tow important phenomena are mentioned and studied: dehumidification in order to match indoor comfort criteria and humidification to produce the cooling effect. In this work, different configuration of desiccant cooling installation are studied and compared. The study focused on the cooling branch of each configuration. The principal components used in the different configurations presented are; desiccators, heat exchanger and a humidifier. The objective of this study is to evaluate the more efficient system to be used. For this aim a numerical tool was used. The reliability and efficiency of the numerical tool established was tested and validated by comparison against data collected from literature.