Experimental investigation on a novel temperature and humidity independent control air conditioning system - Part I: Cooling condition

Temperature and humidity independent control system (THIC) has become a research focus for its merits of energy saving and improved indoor thermal comfort. In this paper, a novel THIC system was experimentally investigated, which consisted of a solid desiccant heat pump (SDHP) to handle the latent load and a variable refrigerant flow (VRF) air conditioning system to deal with the sensible load, respectively. An experimental setup of this joint SDHP and VRF system (JDVS) was established to measure the system performance under cooling condition. Meanwhile, an experimental setup of widely adopted joint heat recovery ventilator (HRV) and VRF system (JHVS) was also built up to make a comparison. Performances of both JDVS and JHVS were evaluated by indoor air condition, energy consumption and coefficient of performance (COP). Experimental results show that, JDVS can achieve energy saving of 17.2%, while COP of JDVS increases by 25.7% compared with JHVS. In addition, JDVS with indoor relative humidity stabilizing at 50%, can provide better indoor thermal comfort than JHVS.