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Abstract Developing methods for providing human comfort with minimum cost has always been a challange to engineers particularly in the developing countries where less complicated equipment are essential. The inherent simplicity of the evaporative cooling process makes it among the most adequate methods for application in developing countries. However evaporative cooler performance depends on the climatic conditions, they handle large quantities of air and work on a hundred percent outdoor air. The prime purpose of this investigation was to introduce a simple design of an air conditioner which reduces the above limitations of the evaporative coolers. A proposed cycle for this conditioner employing a dehumidification process by using a silica material, followed by cooling process and then evaporative cooling process was investigated. The dehumidification tests were designed to study the effect of the silica gel bed thickness, inlet air temperature, inlet air humidity ratio and face velocity on the rate of moisture adsorbed by local silica gel. In the combined dehumidification and cooling test the variation of the final air temperature leaving the conditioner over running period of one hour was investigated. The effect of the cooling coil temperature on this final temperature as well as the cooling capacity of such conditioner were studied. The regeneration test determine the time and energy required to reactivate the silica gel material. A window type conditioner of a cooling capacity of 1.5 ton was designed based on the information obtained from this work with an overall dimension of 125×90×75 cm. |