Overall Heat and Mass Transfer Coefficient of Water Vapor Adsorption

1st Report: Transfer Coefficient for Adsorbent Packed Beds

Abstract

A fundamental investigation was performed to develop a compact and simple desiccant ventilation unit which is one of the main components of a novel energy saving air-conditioning system. Water vapor in the air is adsorbed and/or desorbed to be controlled the humidity of supply air through a unit of an adsorbent packed bed. A numerical simulation helps to understand the phenomena of heat and mass transfer in the bed. Overall transfer coefficients of them as properties for the simulation were estimated by performing both experiment and calculation. It was clarified that the transient overall equivalent heat and mass transfer does not strongly depend on the air flow rate through the packed bed, the averaged equivalent mass transfer is governed by surface and pore diffusion in a particle of adsorbent at low flow rate. Moreover, the coefficient during the adsorption process is slightly larger than desorption. An equation of the overall mass transfer coefficient is derived. It shows five times as large as the value estimated by experiment. Therefore, the correlation and fitting parameters are presented for prediction of the overall heat and mass transfer coefficients. The estimation accuracy was improved.