Yonggao Yin

Experimental Analysis of Direct Evaporative Cooling in Special Temperature Range and Extended Application Study

The experiments of one counter-flow direct evaporative cooling (DEC) system have been carried out to investigate the characteristics of heat and mass transfer between air and water in temperature range of 20 to −7 °C. Three kinds of driving forces in DEC are defined and adopted in this paper, while novel evaluation indices are proposed to evaluate the performance of the process. Experimental data under different parameters of air and water are compared and analyzed. The results show that DEC in unconventional-temperature range is more sensitive to driving forces than in normal temperature range. Consequently, energy performance of DEC would be highly influenced driving forces. Furthermore, to making full use of cooling potential of DEC in lower temperature range, a novel evaporative cooling and heat pump-driven liquid desiccant hybrid system is proposed and its performance has been preliminarily studied.