Development and testing of two-stage evaporative cooler

Evaporative cooling has been proved as an effective method of storage of fruits and vegetables of moderate respiration rates. Therefore, a modified evaporative cooler named two-stage evaporative cooler (TSEC) has been developed to improve the efficiency of evaporative cooling for high humidity and low temperature air conditioning. Two-stage evaporative cooler consists of the heat exchanger and two evaporative cooling chambers. The performance of cooler has been evaluated in terms of temperature drop, efficiency of the evaporative cooling and effectiveness of TSEC over single evaporation. The temperature drop through TSEC ranged from 8 to 16 degrees C. With the several observations for diurnal runs, it was observed that TSEC could drop the temperature up to wet bulb depression of ambient air and provided the 90% relative humidity. Efficiency of single evaporation was 85-90%. Effectiveness of the two-stage evaporative cooling was found to be 1.1-1.2 over single evaporation. The two-stage evaporative cooler provided the room conditions as 17-25 degrees C temperature and 50-75% relative humidity, which can enable to enhance the shelf-life of wide range of fruit and vegetables of moderate respiration rates. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.