Use of liquid desiccant cooling to improve the performance of vapor compression air conditioning

A hybrid air conditioning system, which consists of sections of desiccant dehumidification, evaporative cooling and vapor compression air conditioning, has been established in this paper. Psychrometric analysis at ARI conditions and experimental investigation demonstrate that cooling production of the new hybrid system can increase by 20∼30% and COP can increase by 20∼40%, if they are compared with those of vapor compression system (VCS) alone. With constant COP of VCS under three different cases, the benefits are also represented by reduced size of VCS, lower electricity consumption and less flow rate of condensation air, etc. The reason that the hybrid system is superior in performance to conventional systems lies in that desiccant dehumidification and evaporative cooling changes the inlet states of the air entering into VCS. The effects of dehumidification and evaporative cooling are analyzed.