Innovative desiccant-based evaporative cooling system using flare gas heat recovery

Desiccant-based evaporative cooling (DEC) systems provide cooling in humid regions with much lower energy consumption than conventional cooling systems. This energy saving potential could be more significant when a waste heat source is utilized to operate the system. This paper presents a novel configuration for DEC systems utilizing flare stack waste heat. To evaluate the system performance, a dynamic hourly simulation of DEC system as well as the conventional cooling and dehumidifying system was performed in TRNSYS. It has been found that the DEC system could effectively provide comfort temperature and relative humidity in hot and humid climate with significantly lower energy consumption than the conventional system. During a summer week, the DEC system results to about 4000 kWh electricity saving and 5800 kWh natural gas saving. This DEC system can be successfully used for a number of waste heat recovery applications.

Keywords:

Cooling , Desiccant-based evaporative , Flare , Vapor compression ,