Research on actual performance and energy recovery characteristic of capacitive deionization regeneration method for absorption air-conditioning system

In favor of renewable energy and using green refrigerant, the absorption air-conditioning system is a good measure for overcoming energy shortage and environmental deterioration. With the thermal method, its performance is not good enough because of much heat loss in the regeneration process. For optimal performance, capacitive deionization (CDI) regeneration method was proposed by regenerating absorbent with electrodes in electric field. Previous research shows the theoretical COP of the CDI based system could attain 3. However, these results lack experimental support. Therefore, this paper presents the experimental research on the actual performance. The influence of concentration and other parameters has been analyzed in the experiments. Based on the experimental results, the energy recovery characteristic also gets confirmed and it provides a new way to improve the performance of the CDI based system. Electricity and energy models have been developed; some important parameters have been investigated. The experimental results present the actual regeneration capacity and corresponding COP. The theoretical results expose the improvement of COP with energy recovery and the influences of equivalent series resistance, flow rate and capacitance. It found the COP has potential to further increase by 2 or even 3 times, could reach 6 with appropriate energy recovery.