Experimental Analysis on the Performance of V-MEMD (Vacuum Multi-Effect-Membrane-Distillation) Regenerator for Liquid Desiccant Air Conditioning System

For tropical countries like Singapore, removing latent load from buildings and from fresh air is one of the primary energy consumptions in the building sector. Among the many dehumidification techniques, which are mainly for removing latent load, membrane based liquid desiccant dehumidification has recently gained much attention due to its merit of zero desiccant contamination or carryover into the air, and the ability to use waste heat or renewable energy as a driving heat source. A membrane based liquid desiccant air conditioning (LDAC) system, is composed of a flat sheet membrane-based treble flow dehumidifier unit, and a V-MEMD (vacuum multi-effect-membrane-distillation) system regenerator. A V-MEMD regenerator can perform better than a traditional spray regenerator. But matching between the dynamic latent load and varying heat source temperature of renewable solar energy is very critical to achieve optimum performance in all conditions. A series of experiments have been carried out to find out the optimum operation parameters of the regenerator. The statistical analysis of these experiment data are done by using Design Expert® software to find the optimum operation parameters of heating temperature and desiccant flow rate of the regenerator.