Development and modelling of a solar assisted liquid desiccant dehumidification air-conditioning system

This paper presents the development and simulation of an advanced solar assisted liquid desiccant dehumidification air-conditioning system for energy efficiency and sustainability. The system is mainly designed to cut down building electricity consumption while providing satisfied indoor thermal comfort. It includes a counter flow packed bed absorber, a counter flow packed bed regenerator, and an array of flat plate solar collectors. The system is integrated with an evaporative cooler and a cooling tower to cool the processed air and the strong desiccant solution, respectively. A whole system simulation is used to evaluate the system performance by using a full-scale simulation system developed on the basis of Matlab Simulink platform. The simulation results based on three consecutive sunny summer days in Sydney show that the proposed system can achieve an average daily thermal coefficient of performance of 0.5-0.55, and 73.4% of thermal energy required for thermal regeneration was provided by the solar collectors. It is expected that the average daily thermal coefficient of performance could be higher during other mild summer days as the percentage of thermal energy provided by the solar water heating system will increase due to the relatively low cooling demand of the building.