Determination of cost-efficient cooling power range for improving the performance of internally cooled ultrasonic atomization liquid desiccant dehumidifiers.

Liquid desiccant dehumidifiers (LDDs) can be improved by adding internal cooling. However, the addition of excessive cooling power may deteriorate the system's cost-efficiency, whereas the addition of insufficient cooling power leads to negligible performance improvements. The objective of this study is to determine the suitable cost-efficient cooling power range for improving the performance of internally cooled LDDs (IC-LDDs). A novel method and a set of criteria related to the moisture removal rate, cooling-power efficiency (η _c) and coefficient of dehumidification performance from cooling power (DCOP _cooling) were proposed to determine cost-efficient cooling power. The internally cooled ultrasonic atomization liquid desiccant system (IC-UADS), together with a well-validated model based on the conservation laws of mass and energy and the sensible heat balance, was adopted to demonstrate the analysis. The results showed that, although the dehumidification performance improves with increasing cooling power, the improvement rate decreases, while η _cand DCOP _coolingdecline quickly (by 87.9%). For cost-efficient improvement, the necessary power proportion of internal cooling to the system's target dehumidification capacity tends to be stable, which was about 29% for the IC-UADS, and independent of the operating conditions. The results may help to determine the reasonable cooling power range for cost-efficient improvement of IC-LDDs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]