Energy saving potential of latent heat exchanger-integrated dual core energy recovery ventilator

High-efficiency energy recovery ventilators (ERVs) have a significant impact on the conservation of building energy. In particular, the importance of the latent cooling performance of ERV which used in hot, humid climates has been growing. To enhance the latent heat recovery performance of the existing ERVs and attain satisfactory sensible heat recovery performance as well, a dual-core energy recovery ventilation unit combining a hollow fiber membrane-based latent heat exchanger (M-LHX) and a sensible heat exchanger (SHX) was proposed in a previous work. This study evaluated the energy saving potential of the proposed ventilation unit integrated airconditioning system via a series of building energy simulation. As the reference system, a conventional ERV with a flat-plate membrane enthalpy exchanger was chosen. The M-LHX and SHX in the proposed ventilation unit enable decoupled sensible and latent heat recovery of outdoor air. Energy simulations were conducted for a single-story office building located in South Korea, which is one of the humid regions during the summer. The simulation results showed that the proposed ventilation unit could reduce 15.9, 14.4, and 14.1% of building airconditioning loads in summer, intermediate season, and winter, respectively, compared with the reference ERV. This is because the proposed ventilation unit provided energy benefits by recovering more latent heat from the M-LHX and comparable amount of sensible heat from the SHX than the reference system. Accordingly, the proposed system presented the annual primary energy savings of 10.6% over the reference system, although the proposed system consumed more fan energy.