Experimental investigation on solar powered self-cooled cooling system based on solid desiccant coated heat exchanger

• A solar powered self-cooled desiccant coated heat exchanger system is developed.
• An experimental setup of the system is constructed.
• Performance of the system is evaluated by experimental system.
• A comparison between the self-cooled system and the conventional system is made.
• The performance of the self-cooled system is better than the conventional system.

The objective of this paper is to validate the practical performance of a novel self-cooled solid desiccant cooling system which consists of DCHE (desiccant coated heat exchanger) and regenerative evaporative cooler. In the system, part of the outlet air from the desiccant coated heat exchanger is pumped into the evaporative cooler to produce cooling water adopted in the dehumidification process. The heating water required in the regeneration process is coming from the vacuum tube solar collector system. An experimental setup is designed and built to test the performance of the new system. The average moisture removal Dave and thermal coefficient of performance COPth are utilized as the performance indices. It is found that the SDCHE (self-cooled solid desiccant coated heat exchanger) system has better moisture removal capacity compared with the solid desiccant coated heat exchanger system, and higher thermal coefficient of performance COPth is also obtained by SDCHE system. The average moisture removal Dave and COPth of SDCHE system are about 17% and 6% higher than that of DCHE system under similar operating condition. While other parameters remaining the same, the moisture removal Dave and thermal coefficient of performance COPth increases significantly with increasing inlet humidity ratio.