Tuesday, August 30, 2022

My Evaporative Cooling Test Bed, A Review

While working on my previous post regarding the usefulness of the Psychrometric Chart, I had a thought regarding the test bed I built last season.  I noticed large differences in the exit air temperature between my setup and a similar one built by Desertsun02 -- his system was outputting colder air than mine.

In retrospect, this probably is due to different cooling pads.  Doing some online searching revealed that different pads have higher efficiency compared to some of the synthetic ones, like the ones I'm using.  The old-fashioned shredded Aspen pads apparently are pretty good, as well as paper ones with a honeycomb pattern.  One big difference may be that the synthetic pad type I'm using isn't very thick so the air doesn't have as long a "dwell time" in the pad compared to thicker ones.

I'd like to get the exit air temperature lower because I think I can use it to pre-cool the air flowing _into_ the evaporative cooler.  That could get me closer to performance like the Maisotsenko Cycle, which theoretically can output air that is very close to the dew point. So it looks like I need to experiment with a different pad, along with everything else.


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