Groundbreaking Air Conditioning Technology Uses Desiccants

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) researchers have invented a breakthrough technology that improves air conditioning in a novel way – with heat. NREL combined desiccant materials, which remove moisture from the air using heat, and advanced evaporative technologies to develop a cooling unit that uses 90% less electricity and up to 80% less total energy than traditional air conditioning. The new solution, called the desiccant enhanced evaporative air conditioner (DEVAP), also controls humidity more effectively to improve the comfort of people in buildings.

Transcript

00:00:05 “I would call it revolutionary technology…It’s extremely different from the way we’ve done cooling in the past.” “Air conditioning is not something that you normally think of when you go into a building but it’s something that impacts our environment a lot… uses a lot of energy. It uses over 12% of the electricity that we generate here in the United States. This particular air conditioning technology can provide air that’s much more comfortable and healthier than standard air conditioning.” “The other big advantage is it’s incredibly efficient. It’s very cost-effective.” “It saves between 40- and 80% of that energy that we use to air condition our spaces.”

00:00:51 “And so what DEVap or Desiccant Enhanced Evaporative Cooling does… is it uses desiccant. It uses evaporative processes and it uses the membrane to contain the desiccant. Desiccant is like if you’ve ever bought something and it had a little packet of silica gel in the packaging, that little powder is a powder that can absorb moisture out of the air.” “We thought to ourselves… well, this is a good combination of technologies that can be put together to make an air conditioner that works anywhere in the country.” “It can work where it’s hot and humid. It can work where it’s hot and dry… wherever you have a cooling load.

00:01:30 Now, it’s not to say that there haven’t been desiccant coolers and evaporative coolers, but there’s nothing like this which puts together the core elements in as efficient and compact a package as this.” “We use a specially designed heat exchanger and we bring air through that heat exchanger and it generally gets dried out considerably… now, that air is still warm, but it’s dry. That air is good to then put through an evaporative cooler and at the end of the evaporative cooler, we have very dry, cold air that we can supply to the building. This is a prime example of the type of technology that NREL works on.” Ron 11:35 “It’s thrilling.

00:02:09 We think it could be very big.”