Development of a performance enhancer for a dehumidifier

In this study, performance enhancers (PEs) for dehumidifiers (DHs) were developed, and the PEs were installed on the return air side of the dehumidifier to test and evaluate the performance of the dehumidifier. The PEs were aluminum plates with different pore size distributions that were based on the return air distributions of an evaporator. The pore size was inversely proportional to the airflow resistance to improve the uniformity of the return air through the evaporator for achieving better heat exchange and condensation performance of the evaporator. The PEs used in this study were divided into 3 (PE1), 6 (PE2), and 11 (PE3) grades based on the return air velocity. The dehumidifier performance test was performed based on the CNS 12492 standard under standard and overload environmental conditions. The experimental results revealed that the dehumidifiers with PEs can improve the dehumidification capacity and energy factor (EF) of the dehumidifier under most experimental conditions, and the dehumidifiers with PEs exhibited higher performance enhancement under the overload environmental condition than under the standard environmental condition. The highest EF values of dehumidifiers with PEs can be increased by 5.46 % for PE1 and by 5.84 % for PE3 compared with the original dehumidifier under the same experimental parameters, respectively. Based on the average experimental results of standard and overload environmental conditions, PE1 exhibited the highest improvement up to 4.76 % in the EF of a dehumidifier.