Energy‐efficient hybrid A/C and freshwater production system proposed for high latent load spaces

Abstract

Summary Huge amount of energies is consumed by the air conditioning (A/C) to maintain the required temperature and humidity inside spaces/applications of high humidly. An innovative A/C system that recovers the condenser heat in process air reheating and other useful thermal utilization is presented and investigated in this paper. For high coefficient of performance (COP) of the AC and more energy‐efficient system, the cold exhaust air rejected by the air condition system is also utilized to cool the condenser of the AC system. Huge amount of the water condensate from the system is also utilized as freshwater production. Performance of the proposed system is analytically investigated for different operating conditions and system capacities. Mathematical model of the systems is developed and solved numerically using Engineering Equation Solver (EES) software. Results show that the proposed system enhances the COP and decreases the electric power consumption. The saving in electric power consumption, COP, and the freshwater production rate of the system increases with decreasing room‐sensible heat factor, fresh air ratio, and outdoor air temperature and humidity. Moreover, the COP of the proposed system is 90% higher than COP of the basis system, and the savings in the running cost of the system increase by 4.5 times with decreasing the room‐sensible heat factor (RSHF) from 0.6 to 0.2. In addition, the highest COP attained by the proposed system is 2.72, and the corresponding freshwater production rate is 373.8 kg/h.

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