Enhancement in air-cooling through integration of desiccant coated channels with cross-flow indirect evaporative heat and mass exchanger

Air-cooling demand for human thermal comfort is significantly rising due to population growth, urbanization, and global warming. Although indirect evaporative air cooling offers one of the solutions but the performance of system is less effective when ambient air is very humid like in monsoon seasons. Therefore, in the current work, a detailed experimental analysis of an innovative integrated indirect evaporative heat and mass exchanger with silica gel coated channels is presented. The testing setup consists of dehumidification bed with silica gel coated desiccant coated aluminum channels and cross flow heat and mass exchanger having 2 kW of design cooling capacity. The investigation of the integrated system is presented in terms of wet bulb and dew point effectiveness, cooling capacity, and coefficient of performance (COP). The maximum air dehumidification of 14 g/kg is achieved at 4 m/s. The results also revealed the maximum air temperature reduction of 13.4 °C is achieved through integrated system compared to 9 °C of the baseline system. In addition, the COP and cooling capacity of the integrated system is varied between 3.7 and 15.19, and 0.5–2.0 kW, respectively which are about 36.66 % better compared to the baseline system. So, the integration of silica coated channels with indirect evaporative cooling system is a promising solution for providing affordable human thermal comfort in the hot and humid regions.