Atmospheric water generator: design for rural zones with low and medium humidity level

Abstract

Water shortage is one of the major issues in the world. The consequences can impact negatively on the develop of a location. Puno is an arid region located in Peru. There have been different problems related to water shortage in recent years. Some communities use a waterhole filled by precipitation as a source of water. This is usually far from their communities, then they have to transport manually buckets of water by waking. In this paper, we establish a design procedure of an atmospheric water generator (AWG) located at Puno with a capacity of 40L per day in order to deal with the water shortage. Current AWGs are designed for locations with favorable climatic conditions as high relative humidity (RH). However, they wouldn't be able to operate in dried seasons as at Puno with RH under 25%. An adsorption process is implemented as an additional module in order to compensate the low ambient temperature and RH during the worst climatic conditions from June to August. An analytic model of dehumidification by a heat exchanger was developed in order to quantify influence of parameters as climatic conditions and mass fluxes. Results showed that the design is capable to produce water during all the variable climactic conditions over the year. Numerical simulations of the analytic model indicated that the system can produce water by direct cooling in most months without the support of adsorption process.