Performance Evaluation of a Solar-Aided Liquid Desiccant Evaporative Cooling System

The need to cut out issues like global warming, ozone layer depletion and excessive power consumption has led to an alarming upsurge of digging out alternative ways to reach out the increasing demands of human comforts. In recent times, solar aided desiccant cooling system is an appreciable method to extirpate moisture content from air whereby reaching out to human comfort levels in a cost effective manner. This paper involves the performance evaluation of various liquid desiccants by an air conditioning test rig using potassium formate, lithium chloride and calcium chloride as liquid desiccants. The relation of the variation in the air velocity of the ambient air into the system is with the variation of temperature and percentage relative humidity of the process air is compared using the three desiccants and are compared for the best results. Moreover, the approach of model predictive control was implemented in this system to increase the efficiency of the system.