Dynamic operational characteristics and preliminary control of a packed liquid desiccant dehumidifier

Liquid desiccant dehumidifiers (LDDs) has attracted much attention due to its advantages of energy saving and environmental protection. However, dynamic characteristics of LDDs, which are essential to develop appropriate control methods, are still not clear at present. In this paper, the performance of a packed LDD was investigated under changes of desiccant inlet temperature and flow rate as well as air inlet humidity ratio, temperature and flow rate. Due to the random packings and interaction between air and desiccant, the air is normally distributed randomly during a dynamic process of LDDs and air outlet humidity ratio at the sampling point is serrated with time going. It was found that exponent function could be utilized to smooth the experimental result of air outlet humidity ratio, providing a simple way to determine the evaluation indexes like the response delay and response time as well as response rate, which could facilitate to evaluate dynamic characteristics of the dehumidifier. And through comparing those evaluation indexes corresponding to changes of different inlet parameters, it was revealed that air outlet humidity ratio was more sensitive to the change of desiccant or air flow rate, but not desiccant inlet temperature as indicated in a previous research getting from quasi-steady state experiments. Therefore, it would be more reasonable to select the desiccant or air flow rate as control variables instead of desiccant inlet temperature. Furthermore, preliminary control experiments were conducted to compare the performance of control algorithms developed based on the steady state characteristics and expert experience of dynamic characteristics. Results show that the control algorithm developed based on the expert experience of dynamic characteristics performs much better, which indicates that the obtained steady state characteristics in existing researches are unsuitable for developing control algorithms for a packed LDD. The dynamic characteristics revealed in current research paves the way for the future development of appropriate control algorithms. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.