Experimental investigation of counter flow heat exchangers for energy recovery ventilation in cooling mode

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd and IIR Ventilation heat recovery is a system that requires low power to operate and has a high capacity to reduce the energy consumption and increase the overall efficiency for air conditioning. This paper reports the experimental investigation of air-to-air heat exchangers employed for heat recovery ventilation in cooling mode. The two main objective of this research are to design, fabricate and testing two polymers heat exchangers of different plate geometries and to evaluate and compare the thermal performance two quasi-counter flow plate heat exchangers. The key aims were to evaluate the effect of the surface geometry of the plates heat exchanger on the performance parameters specified in ANSI/ASHRAE Standard 84 and ANSI/AHRI Standard 1060 and narrow the gap of the limited experimental comparison of polymers sensible heat exchanger in cooling mode. The experiments were conducted on two polymer heat exchangers, one with a flat plate and the other with a dimpled surface plate. The experimental results showed that the cooling capacity of the dimpled surface heat exchanger as ventilation heat recovery system in cooling mode was 50–60% better than that of the flat surface plate heat exchanger. In addition, the sensible efficiency of the dimpled surface heat exchanger was higher than that of the flat surface plates heat exchanger at lower air velocities and higher air initial temperatures. The highest COP was 6.6 achieved with dimpled surface heat exchanger under primary air operating temperature of 32.6 °C