Membrane based liquid desiccant dehumidifier and regenerator system have recently gained much attention in liquid desiccant air-conditioning (LDAC) system due to their merit of zero contamination or carryover and resistance to corrosion. A typical system for the LDAC application will consist of a number of stages depending on the capacity of the LDAC system. The multi-effect design allows energy recovery to be achieved to reduce the overall thermal energy consumption. The objective of this study was to test and evaluate the effectiveness and performance of solar powered multi-effect distillation system with desiccant salt solution.
Design Expert was used to characterize the output of regenerator system and optimize overall design using sets of experiment test data. The optimized working zone for performance ratio for different feed flow rate and hot water temperature has been derived. It was found that the optimized zone for LiCl inlet concentration 31.71% was representing performance ratio of 0.5 if operated at feed flow rate range of 32 L/min to 60 L/min and hot water temperature of 54°C to 67°C and optimized zone for LiCl inlet concentration 37.74% was representing performance ratio of 0.5 if operated at feed flow rate range of 40 L/min to 50 L/min and hot water temperature of 59°C to 67°C.
