Desiccant cooling assisted vapor compression system: A double stage desiccant cooling cycle via evaporative condenser

To promote wider distribution of desiccant cooling technologies, a desiccant cooling assisted vapor compression system (DCVCS) is proposed. As a continuation of desiccant cooling (DC) systems development, DCVCS was built upon combination of a DC cycle and a vapor-compression (VC) cycle in a serial manner. In DCVCS, air-cooling is firstly produced in the DC cycle and the chilled air is used to the evaporative condenser of the VC cycle. Then through the pipework, the condensed refrigerant is delivered to the conditioning space and air-conditioning of the space is achieved via the evaporator in the space. In the DCVCS composed of the two cycles, a proper match between the two cycles is particularly important for the optimal performance of the combined system. The performance of the DCVCS is optimized by cycle simulation and comparatively analyzed with respect to a reference desiccant cooling system (RDCS). It shows that, for the optimally matched system configuration of DCVCS, the energy consumption reduces by 20–50% and the cooling capacity increases 3–4 times, compared with RDCS.