Experimental investigation on a novel temperature and humidity independent control air conditioning system – Part II: Heating condition

• A novel temperature and humidity independent control system is proposed.
• This proposed system is experimentally investigated on heating condition.
• This proposed system is compared with a traditional system.
• Energy saving and improved indoor thermal comfort can be achieved simultaneously.

Air source heat pump is a widely adopted system for winter heating in Central China and South China due to its high energy efficiency and low maintenance cost. However, such systems cannot produce any latent capacity resulting in decreased indoor air quality. Newly developed temperature and humidity independent control system (THIC) provides a solution to this problem. In this study, a novel THIC system was introduced and experimentally investigated under heating condition, which consisted of a solid desiccant heat pump (SDHP) and a variable refrigerant flow (VRF) air conditioning system to handle the latent load and sensible load, respectively. An experimental setup of the joint SDHP and VRF system (JDVS) was established, and the system was evaluated by indoor air condition, energy consumption and system coefficient of performance (COP). In addition, the proposed JDVS system was compared with widely adopted joint heat recovery ventilator (HRV) and VRF system (JHVS). Experimental results show that JDVS can keep indoor humidity ratio at about 50%RH, however JHVS can only increase the indoor humidity ratio to around 30%RH. In addition, JDVS can achieve energy saving of 9.3%, while the COP of JDVS increases by 45.2% compared with JHVS.