Documenting the Effectiveness of Cosorption of Airborne Contaminants by a Field-Installed Active Desiccant System: Final Report - Phase 2D
The final report for Phase 1 of this research effort (ORNL/SUB/94-SV004/1) concluded that a significant market opportunity would exist for active desiccant systems if it could be demonstrated that they can remove a significant proportion of common airborne contaminants while simultaneously performing the primary function of dehumidifying a stream of outdoor air or recirculated building air. If the engineering community begins to follow the intent of ASHRAE Standard 62, now part of all major building codes, the outdoor air in many major cities may need to be pre-cleaned before it is introduced into occupied spaces. Common air contaminant cosorption capability would provide a solution to three important aspects of the ASHRAE 62-89 standard that have yet to be effectively addressed by heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment manufacturers: (1) The ASHRAE standard defines acceptable outdoor air quality. If the outdoor air contains unacceptable levels of certain common outdoor air contaminants (e.g., sulfur dioxide, ozone), then the standard requires that these contaminants be removed from the outdoor air stream to reach compliance with the acceptable outdoor air quality guidelines. (2) Some engineers prefer to apply a filtration or prescriptive approach rather than a ventilation approach to solving indoor air quality problems. The ASHRAE standard recognizes this approach provided that the filtration technology exists to remove the gaseous contaminants encountered. The performance of current gaseous filtration technologies is not well documented, and they can be costly to maintain because the life of the filter is limited and the cost is high. Moreover, it is not easy to determine when the filters need changing. In such applications, an additional advantage provided by the active desiccant system would be that the same piece of equipment could control space humidity and provide filtration, even during unoccupied periods, if the active desiccant system were operated in a recirculation mode. (3) Almost all major medical, university, and research facilities face the dilemma that the air exhausted from a building exits near the intake of another building. As a result, contaminants exhausted outdoors are pulled back into the same or an adjacent building. The removal of contaminants from outdoor air that an active desiccant system offers would be attractive to applications in such cases. The primary objective of this research project was to quantify the ability of the SEMCO composite desiccant dehumidification wheel to purify outdoor and recirculated air streams by removing gaseous contaminants commonly encountered in actual applications. This contaminant removal is provided simultaneously with dehumidification (removing the latent load) of these air streams at conditions encountered in HVAC applications. This research builds upon initial seed work completed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) during 1993 (Bayer and Downing 1993).
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 885791
- Report Number(s):
- ORNL/SUB/62X-SVO44V/2D; TRN: US200617%%203
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Energy efficient strategies for improved dehumidification
Development of an Integrated Residential Heating, Ventilation, Cooling, and Dehumidification System for Residences