Experimental Study on a Solar Powered Two-Stage Solid Wheel Desiccant Air Conditioning System

A new formulation, that employs both two-stage dehumidification and intercooler to effectively enhance system performance is proposed and investigated experimentally. The paper briefly describes desiccant wheel including the coupled fundamental principle and overall structure originally. An experimental setup is subsequently designed and built to evaluate the system performance under various operation conditions. The effects of different fresh air intake temperature at various regeneration temperature under given conditions are numerically analyzed and explained. Finally, results of a test-case are presented, indicating compared with the common single-stage system, an increase in humidity removal. Meanwhile, increasing regeneration air volume and temperature can significantly improve the dehumidification ability for sorbent materials and coefficient of performance of the system respectively, as well as save indirectly electric energy consumption, which is derived from the energy-intensive regeneration blower.