Performance Test for a Horizontal Regenerative Evaporative Cooler

수평형 재생증발식 냉방기의 성능시험

Regenerative evaporative cooling is known as an environment-friendly and energy efficient cooling method. A regenerative evaporative cooler (REC) consisting of dry and wet channels is able to cool down the air stream below the inlet wet-bulb temperature. In the regenerative evaporative cooler, the cooling effect is achieved by redirecting a portion of the air flown out of the dry channel into the wet channel and spraying water onto the redirected air. In this study, a horizontal regenerative cooler is considered. In the horizontal regenerative cooler, the flow direction of evaporating water has a right angle to the flow direction of supply air. This difference was investigated with visualization technique and simplified 2-module performance test was done in a thermo-environment chamber. Optimum design configuration is changed due to the wet channel which are easily fully covered with evaporating water and block the air flow inside the channel. Applying the optimized fin configuration design with the highly wetting surface treatment, a regenerative evaporative cooler was fabricated and tested to Identify the cooling performance improvement and operation characteristics. From the experimental results at the intake condition of $32^{\circ}C$ and 50% RH, the supply temperature was measured to be around $23.4^{\circ}C$. The cooling effectiveness based on the inlet dewpoint temperature was evaluated 73% which is almost close to the design expectation.