Waste pressure energy recovering hybrid system for evaporative cooling

Abstract

To help overcoming the biggest current challenge in adopting evaporative cooling on a large scale, this study presents a novel configuration for a hybrid equipment for evaporative cooling with Tube Vortex (IEC/ VT cooler). The main challenge for the evaporative cooling systems' good performance is related to its high level dependency on the ambient air conditions, which in damp or mild climates leads to very limited cooling capacity. The main obstacle that makes it difficult the proliferation of evaporative cooling systems is represented by the minimum temperature value that can be obtained during the process, whose value depends strongly on the characteristics of the ambient air. In order to overcome this difficulty it is presented a physical configuration of a new system equipped with Vortex Tube for indirect evaporative cooling to temperatures below the adiabatic saturation temperature and, if necessary, below the dew point temperature. Numerical values of the coefficient of performance of the new evaporative cooler equipped with Vortex Tube are twice the size of COPs for equipment with vapor compression cycle, revealing a large potential for energy savings. By considering a low value for the compression ratio, and thus enabling the use of residual energy from pressurized gaseous effluents whose cost is almost zero, this study states the effective technical and economic feasibility of the evaporative cooler equipped with Vortex Tube for industrial applications.