Humidity control
www.heatingandventilating.net
A summer role for humidifiers
Dave Marshall-George, sales director at Condair, examines how humidifiers can provide cooling to a building’s fresh air supply, in combination with energy recovery systems
R
ecovering heat from a building’s extract air is a well-established method for reducing HVAC energy consumption during the winter.
However, recovering thermal energy for cooling in the summer also offers huge potential but is a greatly underused strategy. Now given the similarity in temperature between a building’s incoming and outgoing summer air, you might think that warm extract air offers little potential for cooling incoming fresh air. And by itself, you’d mostly be right. However, by adding an evaporative humidifier to the exhaust airstream, the temperature of the extract air can be greatly reduced. This increases the potential for energy recovery from outgoing to incoming airstreams in the summer, allowing a high efficiency run-around energy recovery system to transfer up to 10°C of cooling from outgoing to incoming airstreams. When water evaporates, it consumes heat
energy from the air. This evaporative cooling effect equates to around 0.68kW of cooling for every 1kg of water evaporated. A single evaporative humidifier can provide up to 1,000kg of water per hour with a resultant 680kW of evaporative cooling, whilst consuming less than 1kW of electricity. So, by adding an evaporative humidifier to the extract airstream, there is only a slight increase in overall energy consumption, whilst the energy recovery system’s potential for providing cooling in the summer is greatly improved.
24 July 2024
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