Efficient Treatment of Ventilation Air Latent Load in Navy Ships for Equipment Longevity and Crew Comfort

To greatly improve energy efficiency and performance of Naval Ship HVAC systems, a breakthrough technology is proposed. This technology involves efficient treatment of air conditioning latent load enabled by recent advancements made at Micro Nano Technologies (MNT) and the University of Florida (UF). The new technology relies on a thermodynamically favorable route for direct removal of moisture from air rather than condensing moisture on cooling coils as in conventional vapor compression cycles. This Phase I effort will analyze energy and operational benefits of the system within the shipboard environment with the main objective of finding the most suitable configuration for Naval Ships. Under this project, we will perform additional tests to supplement our existing data set such that our theoretical models can be updated to reliably predict the system performance under all conditions relevant to Naval Systems. Our models will then be used in conjunction with the knowledge of the existing Naval HVAC architecture, reliability, redundancy, and maintainability to address the Navy specific requirements. A comprehensive system analysis will be performed to determine the most optimal configuration for implementation within the exiting Naval HVAC infrastructure. Materials and mechanical analysis will be conducted to identify changes necessary to meeting MIL standards. The developed data, models, and analysis results will be used to baseline a system configuration for manufacturing and performance demonstration in Phase II.