Design and development of a novel liquid desiccant air-conditioning system

The Direct Evaporative Closed Air Loop (DECAL) system is a novel high efficiency liquid desiccant air-conditioning (LDAC) system which runs primarily on thermal energy rather than electricity. It is designed for residential cooling in hot and humid climates where demand is growing rapidly and incumbent direct-expansion system performance is poor. Unlike other LDAC systems, DECAL is modular. This allows the indoor hardware to remain small and non-intrusive, and offers increased flexibility to install the system in existing building stock without costly changes to the structure. This work lays out the basic operating cycle of the DECAL system and shows its thermodynamic merits in terms of ideal system performance against other LDAC systems. Design studies show DECAL offers improved thermal efficiency, especially in humid climates. The ideal thermal coefficient of performance (COP[subscript th]) is 1.24 at the design point ambient condition of 35C, 60% RH.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Bonner, Ross A.(Ross Anthony)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Douglas Hart.

• Mechanical Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129027

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129027