Experimental investigation of a polymer hollow fibre integrated liquid desiccant dehumidification system with aqueous potassium formate solution

Hollow fibres have been studied as the substitute for metallic materials due to the advantages such as light weight, corrosion resistant and low cost in heat and mass transfer applications. A novel polymer hollow fibre liquid desiccant dehumidification system, in which a cross-flow hollow fibre module (fibre inside diameter = 1.4 mm) serves as the dehumidifier, is presented in this paper. This novel hollow fibre integrated liquid desiccant dehumidification system can be used in an air conditioning system to provide a comfortable indoor environment for hot and humid area. Compared with other conventional liquid desiccant dehumidifier, the polymer hollow fibre has a very small diameter which leads to significantly increased surface area. Moreover, the porous feature of the hollow fibre module can help to eliminate any liquid desiccant droplets carryover into the process air. As a less corrosive and more environmental friendly working fluid, aqueous potassium formate (KCOOH) solution has been selected. The dehumidification performance of the proposed system were analysed experimentally under the conditions of incoming air temperature in the range of 30-45 °C. The variations of dehumidification sensible and latent effectiveness, moisture removal rates were studied by varying the incoming air velocity from 0.65 m/s to 4.5 m/s. With the various values of incoming air relative humidity in the range of 55-75% and the solution concentrations between 36% and 62%, the experimental obtained latent effectiveness are in the range of 0.25-0.43 and the sensible effectiveness are in the range of 0.31-0.52, which is in a satisfactory agreement with the empirical correlation of effectiveness-NTU in the literature.