Study of the performance of an adiabatic cooling pad in an air cooling system

Abstract

Adiabatic cooling pads are mostly used as a previous step for cooling systems, they cause the raise of the cooling system global efficiency. In this study, several types of pads have been analysed regarding on its compactness and thickness. The problem is addressed from an experimental, analytical and numerical point of view.vThe validation of the temperature drop and cooling efficiency of the cooling pad numerical model is the main objective of this paper, and, in order to get this goal, Discrete Phase Model (DPM) of ANSYS Fluent software is used to calculate how water droplets, injected over the pad to cool the air, evaporate and how the continuous phase affect them. The results of this paper, focused to be a part of a complete cooling system analysis carried out by the research group, show the performance of an adiabatic cooling pad varying its width and compactness. ; The authors acknowledge the financial support received from the Spanish Government, through Projects ENE2013-48696-C2-1-R and C2-2-R as well as by the FEDER (Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional).