SOLAR DESICCANT EVAPORATIVE COOLING

Abstract

Vapor Compression Cooling systems are creating a lot of problems for mankind including destruction of ozone layer and global warming due to emission of greenhouse gases. Secondly they have substantially high energy requirements and are also rendered inefficient in humid conditions. Need of the hour is for some cheap environment friendly alternative that can run on recyclable energy. Therefore a new design of desiccant based evaporative cooling is proposed which runs primarily on solar energy. The use of desiccant system would dehumidify the air and solar air heater would be used for regeneration of desiccant system. This dehumidified air can be effectively cooled using a setup of evaporative coolers which only use water and air as their working fluids. The overall objective is to develop and test the proposed design to find out the potential of solar desiccant based cooling. An important task of this project is to make the whole apparatus economically viable and to have all the components in simple arrangements for easier use by the general public. The widespread adoption of such a system will lead to a green environment friendly cooling system that has very low electrical input or can be run entirely on solar energy.