Experimental Study And Performance Analysis Of Heat Pipe Dehumidifier

With the rapid development of social economy, more and more air conditioning equipments are used, which cause air-conditioning building energy consumption dramatically increase. Hence, much room exists for saving energy and reducing consumption. Therefore, digging the energy conservation potential sufficiently and reduce building energy consumption of air conditioning are the current research directions and tasks.Heat pipe, as one of the efficient heat transfer components, has been paid great attention due to its excellent heat transfer performance. Thereinto, thermosyphon-based heat pipe has attracted more and more attention in energy conservation field because of its own characteristic, including simple structure, easy fabrication, no other auxiliary equipment and low operation and maintenance cost, in addition to the advantages of general heat pipe. Nowadays, It has been widely used in chemical industry, electronic heat dissipation, high temperature waste heat recovery and so many other occasions.Accordingly, in this paper, we try to use the heat pipe energy-saving technology into ordinary freezer dehumidifier and construct the thermosiphon dehumidifier. The humid air firstly flow through the evaporator section of the thermosyphon-based heat pipe, which can effectively reduce the inlet air dry bulb temperature of refrigeration system evaporator and then flow through the thermosyphon-based heat pipe condensation section, which can improve the outlet air temperature. The whole process can realize the pre-cooling and reheating of the dehumidified air in the direction of the airflow and reduce thermal loss of the refrigeration system.The operating characteristics of the thermosiphon dehumidifier in normal temperature conditions were experimentally studied. The influence of inlet air state parameters on the dehumidification system was experimentally studied and analyzed by controlling the three key inlet air state parameters, including air dry bulb temperature (18 ℃,27℃,32 ℃,25℃), relatively humidity (47%,54%,60%, 78%) and air flow Reynolds number in the range of 663 to 1531. The result shows that the installation of thermosyphon-based heat pipe for air conditioning system can significantly improve dehumidification performance of the system. Compared with the ordinary air conditioning system, the dehumidification amount of thermosiphon dehumidifier can significantly increase and dehumidifying energy consumption reduce. Moreover, it has a higher energy utilization rate. The results showed that the higher the inlet air dry bulb temperature or the relative humidity is, the larger the amount of dehumidification is. In addition, with the increase of Reynolds number, the amount of dehumidification slowly increases, the sensible heat efficiency is the main factor in the thermal efficiency of the heat exchanger in the phase transformation process. With the increase of the inlet air flow Reynolds number and relative humidity, the thermosiphon heat exchanger has lower efficiency. Based on the experimental data, the calculation correlation is obtained related to the Reynolds number, the energy utilization ratio and other dimensionless parameters. Besides, the numerical simulation for the thermalsiphon straw exchanger evaporator section was made to analyze the temperature and velocity distribution. The results provide a reference for the thermosiphon dehumidifier performance optimization and engineering application.