New climate-control units for more energy-efficient Electric Vehicles: The innovative Three-Fluids Combined Membrane Contactor

This paper describes the work in progress in the XERIC project, funded within the Horizon 2020 EU program, which is aimed at building and testing a new climate-control system. The latter integrates a vapour compression cycle with a liquid desiccant cycle to increase Battery Electric Vehicles autonomy thanks to its increased energy efficiency. The modeling activity carried out on the design of an innovative Three-Fluids Combined Membrane Contactor (3F-CMC) and on the development of a lumped-parameters model to predict the 3F-CMC performance is described. The physical assumptions considered in the lumped-parameters model are presented. Results of 2D and 3D numerical heat and mass transfer simulations are used to get input data for the lumped code. The effect of air spacer design on the overall component performance is presented.