MadSci Network: Earth Sciences |
There are lots of things that go (or potentially can go) on a psychrometric chart, so I'll have to make a guess as to which piece you are looking for. I'll assume you know how to make the conversion between absolute and relative humidity, and that you have the pure-water properties you need (like vapor pressure and latent heat of water as a function of temperature). If you do happen to need pure water properties, the keeper of the official standards (though you probably don't need such quality for psychrometric charts) is the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam, which has a Website at http://www.iapws.org I should also mention up front that among the best places to find the basic equations of psychrometry are chemical engineering mass transfer textbooks. For example, I'm getting most of my background for this answer from R.E. Treybal, Mass-Transfer Operations, 3rd ed., McGraw-Hill, 1980. Appropriate material is also in Perry's Chemical Engineers' Handbook, which should be in any decent technical library. I assume what you want to be able to do is relate the wet-bulb temperature to the absolute humidity (given the dry-bulb temperature). The relationship between these quantities is given by a mass/enthalpy balance around a liquid drop, and turns out to be: TG-Tw = (LAMw(Yw-Y))/(hG/kY) where: TG is the dry-bulb (normal) temperature Tw is the wet-bulb temperature LAMw is the latent heat of water at the wet-bulb temperature Yw is the absolute humidity (units like kg/kg air) of saturated air at the wet-bulb temperature Y is the absolute humidity hG is a heat-transfer coefficient kY is a mass transfer coefficient For water-air mixtures at normally encountered humidities and temperatures, the ratio hG/kY can be taken to be 950 N m / (kg K) That should be all you need, but I'll mention that another concept you may run into is the adiabatic saturation temperature, which is basically the temperature of liquid required to bring a gas mixture to its dew point if they are brought into contact. The equation for this is the same as for the wet-bulb temperature except that hG/kY is replaced by Cs, the so- called "humid heat", which is the constant-pressure heat capacity of a unit mass of gas and its accompanying vapor. For water in air at commonly encountered conditions, this happens to be very close to the ratio hG/kY, so the adiabatic saturation temperature and the wet-bulb temperature are essentially the same. This equality won't be true in general for other liquid-gas mixtures. Finally, I'll mention that there are a bunch of programs around that do these calculations, as you can see by doing a Web search on the word "psychrometric". It looks like most of them cost money, but there appeared to be at least one or two free ones in my quick search. Of course I can't vouch for the quality of these programs, so you should check any results against a trusted source like Perry's Handbook or the ASHRAE Handbook. Dr. Allan H. Harvey, Phys. & Chem. Properties Div., NIST "Don't blame the government for what I say, or vice-versa."
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