Development of Absorbents with High Contact Area for Applications in Desiccant Coated Heat Exchanger

Desiccant coated heat exchanger (DCHE) is developed from the combination of desiccant absorbents and the conventional fin-tube heat exchanger. The performance of the DCHE is mainly due to the adsorption properties of the coated absorbents. Therefore, to improve the DCHE performance, we fabricated porous ion exchange resin (IER) particles which have highly increased contact areas to be used as the DCHE absorbents. The water uptake and adsorption ratio of the porous and non-porous absorbents were both measured and compared against each other. The results showed that the absorbents with porous structure possessed higher water capacity and adsorption rate than that of the non-porous IER.