Case Studies in Thermal Engineering (Jul 2024)
Uncertainty quantification of exchange efficiency in membrane-based air-to-air energy exchanger cores: Repetitive manufacturing and experiments
Abstract
Air-to-air membrane-energy exchangers have been widely used in green buildings as passive energy-recovery technologies for energy conservation and carbon reduction. An air-to-air membrane-energy exchanger conserves building energy by forcing the indoor exhaust air and unconditioned fresh air to exchange heat and moisture. As a critical performance indicator, the energy-exchange efficiency is primarily determined by the core. To improve energy-saving performance, many studies have been conducted to analyze and enhance the efficiency of air-to-air membrane-energy exchanger cores by manufacturing, testing, modeling, and comparing different cores. However, few studies have investigated the uncertainty introduced by the manufacturing and testing processes (most related research only studied the uncertainty of the sensible efficiency), which means that some positive results of those controlled trials are possibly owing to the manufacturing tolerance or testing errors, rather than real technical progress. This study addresses this problem by quantifying the efficiency uncertainty caused by manufacturing and testing processes. Three cores were produced using the same manufacturing process and materials, followed by identical experimental tests on their sensible, latent, and enthalpy efficiencies. Comparison results suggest that even when all variables are controlled, the differential enthalpy efficiency of two “identical” cores still vary from 0 % to 2 %. Variance of repetitive testing results of a certain core can afford an enthalpy efficiency of 4 % owing to a non-ideal experimental procedure. When manufacturing tolerances and experimental errors are considered simultaneously, the differential sensible efficiency among multiple “identical” cores is within 0–5%, whereas latent efficiency data in winter shows a significant variation of 5–10 % for “identical” cores. The contributions and conclusions of this study are as follows. The efficiency uncertainty caused by manufacturing and testing processes is non-negligible, particularly in latent efficiency. This phenomenon could alert researchers and engineers in this field to conduct repetitive manufacturing and testing while trying to modify/test/compare air-to-air membrane-energy exchanger cores. Because this study is based on a limited number of cores, the quantitative results of this study should be considered a non-universal reference, and a systematic benchmark must be established in the future.
