An overview of modelling techniques employed for performance simulation of low–grade heat operated adsorption cooling systems

Abstract

With increasing social and economic developmental activities, high grade energy sources are depleting at faster rate and also inviting menace of environmental problems. Therefore, to reduce dependency on high grade energy sources for cooling applications and to protect environment, adsorption cooling systems are promising alternatives that are powered by low grade heat sources like solar heat, industrial/automobile waste heat etc. and also use environment friendly refrigerants. But, these systems have still low performances, large size and high cost. Therefore, in order to overcome these difficulties, many researchers are focussing on different ways to improve heat and mass transfers in the heat exchangers of the system to enhance its performance. These strategies include the use of advanced adsorbent material and advanced adsorption cycles, design improvement in heat exchangers and development of mathematical models for optimization of design/operating parameters of the cooling systems. In this paper, various mathematical models for adsorption systems are presented that include thermodynamic models, lumped parameters models; and heat and mass transfer models. These models include equations governing the heat and mass transfer in the main components of the cooling systems. The advantages of this method are that it can produce large volumes of results at no more cost and it is very cheap to perform parametric studies, for instance, to optimize equipment performance. The various numerical methods and experimental validations have been also presented and discussed.