Abstract
Performance assessment of a two-bed silica gel-water adsorption refrigeration system driven by solar thermal energy is carried out under a climatic condition typical of Perth, Australia. A Fourier series is used to simulate solar radiation based on the actual data obtained from Meteonorm software, version 7.0 for Perth, Australia. Two economic methodologies, Payback Period and Life-Cycle Saving are used to evaluate the system economics and optimize the need for solar collector areas. The analysis showed that the order of Fourier series did not have a significant impact on the simulation radiation data and a three-order Fourier series was good enough to approximate the actual solar radiation. For a typical summer day, the average cooling capacity of the chiller at peak hour (13:00) is around 11 kW while the cyclic chiller system coefficient of performance (COP) and solar system COP are around 0.5 and 0.3, respectively. The economic analysis showed that the payback period for the solar adsorption system studied was about 11 years and the optimal solar collector area was around 38 m2 if a compound parabolic collector (CPC) panel was used. The study indicated that the utilization of the solar-driven adsorption cooling is economically and technically viable for weather conditions like those in Perth, Australia.
Highlights
Cooling demand has continued to increase in recent years, due to the need to achieve high thermal comfort in residential buildings
This paper presents dynamic modeling of a solar thermally driven two-bed silica gel–water continuous adsorption cooling system which is driven by a compound parabolic concentrator (CPC)
The adsorption cooling chiller used in this study is a conventional two-bed silica gel-water adsorption system proposed by Alam et al [26] and the detailed operational procedure of the adsorption chiller system was presented in the literature [26]
Summary
Cooling demand has continued to increase in recent years, due to the need to achieve high thermal comfort in residential buildings. Experimentally investigated the cooling power and COP of a closed-type silica gel-water adsorption chiller under different operating conditions. Deshmukh et al [13] proposed a continuous three-bed silica gel water solar-adsorption cooling system with a liquid refrigerant storage tank This system showed the ability to produce a cooling capacity of 0.8 kW for 24 h. Chang et al [15] studied a two-bed, closed-type, solar-powered, silica gel-water adsorption chiller. The proposed solar-adsorption chiller achieved a COP of 0.402, cooling capacity of 363.8 W and SCP of 1.82 W·kg−1 under continuous operating conditions. The feasibility of both solar-powered systems improved as the size of the commercial building and the electricity consumption rate increased This indicated an economic potential for solar-adsorption systems due to the similarity between the adsorption and absorption systems. The research work provides useful information for decision-makers and engineers in the adoption and design of solar-adsorption cooling technologies
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