Experimental and numerical study of a multi-unit evaporative cooling device in series

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Abstract

In this study, the performance of an evaporative cooling unit device based on the M-cycle cooling principles is evaluated experimentally. Numerical models of the experimental prototype and its scale model have been developed by using CFD software. Numerical analysis of a multi-unit evaporative cooling device in series has been carried out. The cooling effect of multistage series and multistage iteration is also studied. Experimental result shows that under low relative humidity, the decrease in air temperature along the channel is greater than that under a higher relative humidity. The predicted outlet temperature of the dry and wet channels by the experimental-sized model agrees well with the experimental results. The effect of different air volumes in each stage on the cooling (wet-bulb and dew-point) effectiveness is discussed. It’s found that under the same air volume at each stage, the smaller-sized model can achieve 18.3% higher cooling effectiveness compared with the experimental-sized model. The wet-bulb effectiveness of the smaller-sized model with halved flow rate of each stage could achieve as high as 117%. Furthermore, the first stage among four-stage evaporative cooling model has the highest cooling effectiveness.

Keywords

Evaporative cooling
Multistage cooling
Cooling effectiveness
CFD
Numerical simulation

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