Study of the Cooling Performance of a Mist-Type Regenerative Evaporative Cooler Under Different Feed Water Temperature

Abstract

In hot and humid climates, evaporative cooler is coupled with desiccant dehumidifier to obtain effective cooling. To realize the M-cycle-based cooler which combines liquid desiccant regeneration and evaporative cooling in a single apparatus, the effect of different feed water temperature on cooling performance is investigated in this paper. It was observed that wetting water film layer of conventional regenerative evaporative cooler (REC) carries a significant amount of sensible heat from the hot water/solution which reduced the wet-bulb effectiveness of the cooler. To enhance its effectiveness, an ultrasonic atomization mist REC was proposed. The influence of different intake conditions on cooling performance was studied and found that mist REC performed better than conventional cooler for higher feed water temperature. The wet-bulb effectiveness of the cooler ranged from 0.56 to 1.15 with maximum cooling capacity of 580[Formula: see text]W, which is comparable to the previous studies. This prototype can be further developed to an ultrasonic liquid desiccant waterless evaporative cooler.