Experimental Analysis of Energy Recovery Performance of a Hollow Fiber Membrane-Based Ventilation System

Abstract

This study proposes a hollow fiber-structured hydrophilic membrane dehumidification-based ventilation system to experimentally investigate the energy recovery performance of the proposed system. The proposed system comprises a membrane dehumidification module and a sensible heat exchanger. The primary air is dehumidified via water vapor transfer across a porous hydrophilic membrane module. The dehumidified air is then sensibly cooled by the heat exchanger and supplied to the conditioned space. In this study, we mainly investigated the operating performance of the proposed membrane module under various operating conditions in summer via a series of experiments. The measurement results showed that the hollow fiber membrane module can provide isothermal dehumidification, unlike conventional energy recovery ventilator (ERV) cores. In addition, the experiment results show that the proposed membrane module demonstrates 56.2-89.4% dehumidification effectiveness, which is higher than that of commercial ERV cores (50-65%). In addition, the membrane-based ventilation system could reduce 21.6% of the ventilation load compared with the ERV core by achieving higher dehumidification performance.