Experimental investigation of humidification parameters using biomass-based charcoal as an alternative packing material

Due to increase in human population, there is an ever-increasing demand for energy in different sectors which lead to environmental problems like climate change, rise in temperature and global catastrophes. Cooling systems have become a very essential element in recent decades for mankind. Present system focuses on the design and fabrication of a counter flow humidification set up which uses biomass-based charcoal as the packing material. Air velocity and water flow rate have been varied along with the density of charcoal. Output parameters such as change in pressure (ΔP), Coefficient of performance (COP), evaporation rate (ER), humidification efficiency (HE), specific cooling capacity (SCC) and energy consumption (EC) are evaluated. Performance parameters obtained for charcoal are compared with that of standard Celdek Packing. Through experiments it is found that humidification efficiencies for Celdek and charcoal packing are 77.45% and 57.40% respectively. Overall coefficient of performance obtained is 1.41 for charcoal and 3.17 for Celdek packing. Among the three densities which were considered, charcoal packing with density of 400 kg/m³ exhibited higher performance with respect to COP, HE, ER and SCC. Similarly, water flow rate of 0.4 lpm gave maximum performance and 0.7 lpm gave the least. It is concluded that charcoal can be considered as one of the highly efficient biomass-based material contributing to sustainable energy related to cooling applications.