Dehumidifier Heat Pipe Design And Performance Test

Nowadays, scholars are paying more and more attention to heat pipe technology for heat pipe's excellent heat transfer performances. Heat pipe heat exchanger has been used in waste heat recovery, cooling of electronic components, chemicals and other occasions. Applying heat pipe technology to the ordinary heating-up refrigerated dehumidifiers can resolve the problem of energy waste which is caused by the dehumidification process of the ordinary heating-up refrigerated dehumidifiers. The research and development of heat pipe technology can make the "energy saving & emission reduction" come true.In this paper, the author has designed and wrote a Visual Basic-based program, and it can be applied to the thermosyphon-based heat pipe heat exchanger' engineering design. The program has two functions as fellow:first, if three of the four temperatures (thermosyphon-based heat pipe heat exchanger's cold-side inlet temperature and outlet temperature, hot-side inlet temperature and outlet temperature) are known, so the specific structure of the heat pipe heat exchanger can be designed; second, if two of the four temperatures and the structure are known, many results can be obtained, such as heat transfer row-by-row, entrainment limit row-by-row, pressure drops of both hot and cold sides and so on. From the results we can verify if the designing of heat exchanger is compliance with requirements.Based on a comprehensive comparison and analysis of heat pipe which is used in the HVAC and dehumidification system, a new dehumidification system named thernosyphon-based heat pipe heat exchanger dehumidification system has been designed. And this new system is a combination of thernosyphon-based heat pipe heat exchanger and ordinary heating-up refrigerated dehumidifier. According to the National Standard of Dehumidifier, performance test has been carried out. The results showed that the higher the inlet air dry bulb temperature or the relative humidity is, the larger the moisture removal capability per input power is and the smaller the sensible hear ratio will be. Therefore the dehumidification effect will be better. From the results, we also can know that the influence of inlet air relative humidity to the performance of a dehumidification system is bigger than the dry bulb temperature. However, the influence of air flow volume is small. And the amount of moisture removal capability per input power dose not always increase with increasing air flow volume, there is an optimal point. The comparison tests between dehumidification systems with filled and unfilled thermosyphon-based heat pipes show that compared to the ordinary heating-up refrigerated dehumidifier, the thernosyphon-based heat pipe heat exchanger dehumidifier can increase the moisture removal capability per input power at most 60.4% and reduce the sensible heat ratio at most 45.2%. From all the results, we can conclude that the thernosyphon-based heat pipe heat exchanger dehumidifier has significant dehumidification effect.