Liquid Desiccant Dehumidification For Challenging Environments
Liquid desiccants may be among the most valuable HVAC technologies of this young millennium. Some leading researchers and mechanical engineers — and a growing number of large facility owners with significant humidity control challenges — are betting on it. As reported recently, liquid desiccant dehumidification is “an approach to effectively manage humidity under challenging conditions,” including facilities in humid climates with high outdoor air (OA) requirements, applications with precise humidity control needs, and wet industrial applications including food manufacturing.1
The main advantage of liquid desiccant systems is that they remove humidity with far less energy input than either conventional cooling coils or solid desiccant approaches. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL) in Golden, CO, desiccant cooling and dehumidification is a thermally driven air conditioning technology and a “valuable tool in the industry’s arsenal of space conditioning options.”2