Investigation into the effect of mesh size on adsorber bed pressure drop performance for solar powered air conditioning system

摘要

New adsorbent materials are being developed possessing enhanced properties that are being used in development of high efficiency adsorption cooling systems in research and commercial fields. Typical adsorbent systems hold the powder or granular material in place using fine mesh. This research presents the experimental and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analyses done to find pressure drop across woven wire mesh sheets of size: 120x0.090, 150x0.047, 200x0.039 and 500x0.025. Experimental and CFD tests were also done for air flow across a representative unit of adsorber bed when packed with granular adsorbent material of 2mm diameter as well as empty honeycomb unit. The CFD studies showed that using ‘Porous and Free Media Flow’ to model the mesh and adsorbent materials gave similar pressure drop results to experimental values and can be used to predict pressure losses for large and complex adsorbent bed systems. Additionally, capsular cylinders can be used to model the granular material to give pressure drop predictions similar to experimental values and can be used to find permeability values of adsorbent materials without having to test experimentally.