[breischl]

I'm certainly no expert, but as they pointed out this is basically a trompe, which...

>Compressed air from a trompe is at the temperature of the water, and its partial pressure of water vapor is that of the dewpoint of the water's temperature. If the water is cool, the compressed air can be made very dry by passing it through pipes that are warmer than the water. Often, ordinary outside air can warm the pipes enough to produce dry, cool compressed air.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe]

So use a better heat exchanger to cool the water, and then heat up the air until it's dry enough, I guess?

[nomadluap]

A heat pump could be used to cool the water to below-ambient and inject that heat directly into the outgoing compressed air. I wonder if a system like that would be more efficient than installing a separate refrigeration-based system downstream?

[labcomputer]

> this is basically a trompe

Is it though? They don't really explain how it works or show any diagrams, and they said it was "inspired by" the trompe. So I'm a bit confused on that point.

It really looks more like a mashup of a centrifugal compressor and a diffusion pump. One where water instead of oil is used as the working fluid.

[LorenPechtel]

As I see it, the trompe has the problem of needing a lot of distance for gravity to operate it. This basically uses a centrifuge to increase the "gravity" and thus reduce the size.

[labcomputer]

Ah yup. I was misremembering what a tromp was--I was thinking one of those cyclic pumps that uses water hammer (but to compress air rather than pump water).