Numerical Study and Optimization of a Combined Thermoelectric Assisted Indirect Evaporative Cooling System
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s11630-020-1362-7
Article ID: 1003-2169(2020)00-0000-00
Numerical Study and Optimization of a Combined Thermoelectric Assisted Indirect Evaporative Cooling System ZHOU Yuanyuan*, ZHANG Tao, WANG Fang, YU Yanshun School of Energy and Power Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China © Science Press, Institute of Engineering Thermophysics, CAS and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract: This paper numerically investigates the performance of a novel combined cross-regenerative cross flow (C-RC) thermoelectric assisted indirect evaporative cooling (TIEC) system. This C-RC TIEC system combines the indirect evaporative cooling and thermoelectric cooling technologies. A heat and mass transfer model is developed to perform the performance analysis and optimization of this novel system. Performance comparison between the novel C-RC TIEC system and a regenerative cross flow TIEC system is conducted under various operating conditions. It is found that the novel system provides better performance with higher coefficient of performance (COP) and higher dew point effectiveness than the regenerative cross flow TIEC system, especially under smaller working current and smaller number of thermoelectric cooling modules. The performance optimization of the novel system is also made by investigating the influences of primary air parameters, three different mass flow rate ratios, as well as the length ratio of the left wet channel to the whole wet channel. The results show that there exist optimal mass flow rate ratios and wet channel length ratio resulting in the maximum COP.
Keywords: indirect evaporative cooling, thermoelectric, regenerative, cross flow, heat and mass transfer, optimization
1. Introduction Building energy consumption possesses about 30%‒40% of the world’s total energy consumption, about 50% of which is consumed by air conditioning systems in buildings to provide comfort for the system users [1]. With very low energy consumption, high efficiency and environmental friendly working fluid (i.e. air and water), evaporative cooling (i.e. IEC) technology is considered as a potential alternative to traditional air conditioning technologies [2, 3]. An indirect evaporative cooling technology can make good use of the latent heat of water vaporization to indirectly cool the product air (also called Received: Nov 22, 2019 AE: WANG Liwei
primary air) to below the wet bulb temperature, and towards the dew point temperature while keeping constant humidity [4]. However, the performance of an IEC system highly depends on its configuration and ambient air conditions [5]. The cooling potential of IEC systems is limited in the case of high inlet air humidity, and its performance is unstable with the variation of the ambient air condition. In the past decades, researchers have conducted a lot of numerical studies [6] and experimental studies [7] for analyzing the heat and mass transfer mechanism, predicting and optimizing the IEC systems’ perform
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