As discussed in the Liquid Desiccant Tutorial, our water-cooled conditioner uses low-flow liquid-desiccant technology to eliminate carryover of desiccant droplets.  The core of this conditioner is a liquid-to-gas heat exchanger.  The plates of this heat exchanger are made from a plastic extrusion that is 12" wide and 0.1" thick.  The extrusion, shown below in cross section, has 0.08" diameter passages running its length that become cooling channels when the extrusion is assembled into a complete heat exchanger.  As described in our U.S. Patent 6,745,826  and pending foreign patents each plate of the conditioner is attached to an upper and lower end-piece.  When multiple plate/end-piece assemblies are stacked to form a complete conditioner, these end-pieces create both a manifold for the coolant and a desiccant distributor and collection sump.

A 6,000 cfm water-cooled conditioner is shown in the two neighboring figures.  When operating at the nominal air flow, and supplied with 85^oF cooling water and a 43% solution of lithium chloride, this conditioner will process ventilation air from 86^oF and 133 grains to 89^oF and 54 grains--a reduction in enthalpy of 11.7 Btu/lb of processed air or about 26 tons total cooling.  If two conditioners process the ventilation air in series, the air will be delivered at 88^oF and 32 grains--a reduction in enthalpy of 15.4 Btu/lb of processed air or about 34.7 tons total cooling.

The air-side pressure drop through the single conditioner will be about 0.3" w.c.

Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have verified the conditioner's (1) sensible and latent cooling capacity, (2) air-side pressure drops, and (3) operation without the carryover of desiccant droplets.  The conference paper presented at the 2006 ASES meeting in Denver discusses the NREL tests in more detail.