I work for a company. Legally i can't say what we do. But i assure you its nothing secret. It has to do with food lol so you get the point i hope. Anyways, it would be of a major benifit if we could remove humidty from the air in large quanitys. Does anybody have any ideas how this could be done? I was thinking you could have a fine hollow mesh filled with a low tempature fluid (0degrees) and then have something scrape the ice off to keep it from building up, like a fan that scrapes the surface. Then the ice particales could be melted with water down a drain. Any other basic concepts or ideas?
Hi again, Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Actually, there's no need to freeze it - that would be a huge waste of energy. All you need to do is cool the air below the dew point and the moisture will condense out and then you can simply drain it away. If you already have high humidity, it would only take a little effort to cool it enough to remove HUGE quantities of moisture. For example, large computer server farms have to maintain low humidity to prevent damage from electostatic discharges. And as a general rule, just cooling them down to about 65 F. is enough to keep the RH down to around 40%.
So what your saying is i just need to condense the air, and have some sort of device to wick out the moisture? The ultimate goal is zero humitiy (not true zero, thats most likely impossible) Its going to use over 10 000 cfm( Actually i think its alot more than that, i can't remember that), I just can't wrap my head around this. I am trying to create a working scale model. But your method sounds more effeciant than my orginal idea.
There are several manufacturers that build dehumidifers. From a small one that will draw 1-2 liters of water per hour to much more powerful ones that will draw hundreds of liters per hour. The smaller ones are very inexpensive. I first used one when I was a commercial grower of pot. If we didn't draw down the moisture content of the air the curing plants would mold. Hope this helps.
Hmm, it may be possible to use some kind of peltier type device to cool a metallic mesh instead. You could look into computer chip cooling, its one of the foremost areas where intensive cooling is required. If you're going for energy efficiency then the peltier coolers won't help since they are like 5% efficient at most, but they are quiet if that is a requirement. :shrug: There are also chemicals that are very highly hygroscopic that may be used for this purpose. If I remember right the military is designing a chemical condenser which will produce thousands of gallons an hour in the desert. An idea I've had is to use a mesh on a balance - when enough air condenses the balance shifts and the cooling element can dip down into something that will wick off the moisture.
I am trying to build one in house so it can be scaled for a very very large application. I am trying to have the dehumidified air flow through a blower at a very high rate. I was reading the wiki articale about dehumidifiers. It states that it uses a desiccant material with heated air. Im still trying to figure this out. This is complete oppisite of what i was proposing. Also i was looking at the list of desiccants, most of them are alkaline in nature. Most of the materials are used to make batterys...
You don't want to use any type of desiccant. They are very expensive to work with, very slow to work and require heating (lots of it) to recharge (dry out for reuse). Simple refrigeration is the only way to go and there are dehumidifiers of ALL sizes all over the market. Hundreds of them. You'll come out WAY ahead with a commercially-built unit that will also come with a good warranty - five years or better. There's just no way to beat them with anything home-made.
Well where this would be running there are active steam lines and active glycol lines (at about 0 degrees) running constintly.
That won't make any difference in using a commercial dehumidifier. It will still work very well in that environment.
No, what i was saying is that i have those resources to use. I would barly be using any extra energy. I'll explain a little bit more. We blow air into an enclosed space, in which we evaporate water by using heat. Now if the air coming in has 60% humity and leaves with 100% then we filled the air with 40% of humity. Now if the air coming in was at 20% humitiy then we coluld remove 80%(not 80% of the water, but using 80% of the available air water retention(i think thats what you call it)). (am i wrong in any way by saying this?)
Now that i think about it, if you moved twice the amount of air through, it would have the same effect. Correct? So this would still be useful, but only on days where the humity outside reaches 85+
