Development of a New Marine Rotary Desiccant Airconditioning System and its Energy Consumption Analysis

There is abundant high-energy-grade residual heat on ships. The rotary desiccant air-conditioning (A/C) system can recover ship's residual heat to work as the system's driving heat source, achieving significant energy-saving for ship's A/C. In this paper a new two-wheel two-stage rotary desiccant A/C system was developed for a ship. According to operating parameters of a real ship, the ship's available residual heat and the required amount of steam consumption for the rotary desiccant A/C system developed were analyzed; and the system's energy-saving was calcualted. The analysis results showed that the maximum amount of steam generated by residual-heat boiler on the ship is enough to meet the need to drive the marine rotary desiccant A/C system and the need of daily use and fuel oil heating. Compared with the traditional marine A/C system, the new marine rotary desiccant A/C system can save about 33.4% of energy consumption.