Almaneea Abdulmajeed, Alshammari Talal Awad, Aldhafeeri Fahad Yousef, Aldhfeeri Muhammed Hamdan, Allaboun Abdullah Abdulaziz, Almutairi Talal Sryan
Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Majmaah University, Al-Majmaah, 11952, Saudi Arabia.
Heliyon. 2022 Aug 27;8(8):e10265. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e10265. eCollection 2022 Aug.
Middle Saudi Arabia has weather conditions where the temperature is high in summer with low humidity. Conventional air conditioning systems operated by a vapor compression cycle are not economical because of the high electrical power consumption. Therefore, evaporative cooling through evaporative coolers is one of the best and most economical solutions. The present study experimentally investigates the factors affecting the performance of evaporative coolers. Pad materials and airflow rate are the main variables to investigate the evaporative cooler's performance in terms of saturation effectiveness, pressure drop across the pads, and coefficient of performance (COP). Pads material are the local palm tree "Nakheel" waste that are leaflet, leaf base, bulb, and roots. The maximum COP of the cooling system in the case of bulb pad material is 80% more than that of leaflet pad material. The saturation effectiveness of the bulb pad was a maximum which is 61.93% at an airflow of 2.25 m/s, which is more than two times that of the saturation effectiveness of the leaflet pad. The pressure drop across the bulb pad is almost 2.5 times to 9.5 times than that of leaflet pad. Results show that bulb pad performance best, whereas the leaflet pad material has the lowest performance in terms of pressure drop, saturation effectiveness, and COP.
沙特阿拉伯中部地区气候条件为夏季气温高且湿度低。采用蒸汽压缩循环运行的传统空调系统由于电力消耗高而不经济。因此，通过蒸发冷却器进行蒸发冷却是最佳且最经济的解决方案之一。本研究通过实验研究了影响蒸发冷却器性能的因素。填料材料和气流速率是根据饱和效率、填料两端的压降以及性能系数（COP）来研究蒸发冷却器性能的主要变量。填料材料是当地棕榈树“Nakheel”的废弃物，包括小叶、叶基、球茎和根部。在球茎填料材料的情况下，冷却系统的最大性能系数比小叶填料材料的高出80%。球茎填料的饱和效率最高，在气流速度为2.25米/秒时为61.93%，这是小叶填料饱和效率的两倍多。球茎填料两端的压降几乎是小叶填料的2.5倍至9.5倍。结果表明，就压降、饱和效率和性能系数而言，球茎填料性能最佳，而小叶填料材料性能最差。
