NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF AIR DEHUMIDIFICATION THROUGH WATER DROPLETS DIELECTROPHORESIS

Conference · Thu Jun 16 00:00:00 EDT 2022

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1615/TFEC2022.cmd.040912· OSTI ID:1868950

Yel Mahi, *Maliha; Young, David; Shoji, Yasuhiro; Cremaschi, Lorenzo; Cremaschi, Selen

This paper numerically investigated the dehumidification of moist airflow in a converging rectangular duct with electrically enhanced condensation. The aim was to develop a condensation model that predicted water vapor condensation by employing the dielectrophoresis principle. The charged droplets were injected into the computational domain to produce a gradient electric field. The dielectrophoretic interaction between the droplets and vapor molecules of the humid air resulted in local water vapor condensation at the vapor and liquid droplet interface. This phenomenon is described in detail in this paper. A hybrid Eulerian-Lagrangian solver SprayFoam was developed based on OpenFOAM® to simulate condensation in two-phase gas-liquid mixtures. The following developments were made based on the standard compressible multiphase flow solver SprayFoam in OpenFOAM®: (1) Eulerian solver for gas phase (2) multi-component species transport, and (3) Lagrangian solver for gas-droplet two-phase flows and sub-models for liquid droplets. The newly developed numerical model was experimentally validated with data from a series of tests conducted in the authors' laboratory. The results showed that the simulations followed the same trends as the data, and the model predicted the condensation due to the electro-spray injection process in the air stream. The injected water droplets, which are electrically charged to their Rayleigh limits, increased in size while wiping out the humidity from the air. The simulations indicated that the dehumidification was about 1% for 0.5 cubic feet per minute airflow rate. Scaling up to larger flows is a future follow-up work.

• Research Organization: Auburn Univ., AL (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
• DOE Contract Number: EE0009161
• OSTI ID: 1868950
• Resource Relation: Conference: 7th Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference (TFEC) May 16-18, 2022 Las Vegas, NV USA
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English