Membrane and plastic heat exchangers performance

The performance of a membrane-based heat exchanger utilizing porous paper as the heat and moisture transfer media is presented. The measured performance is compared with a plastic film heat exchanger. This novel heat exchanger is used in ventilation energy recovery systems. The results show that the sensible effectiveness is higher than the latent effectiveness. When a similar experiment was conducted using a plastic film heat exchanger surface instead of paper, where only heat is transferred, the sensible effectiveness values were lower than the effectiveness values recorded when the paper heat exchanger is used. Furthermore, energy analysis shows that utilizing a paper surface heat exchanger in a standard air conditioning system will lead to significant energy savings.