Effect of Solar Collector Area and Storage Tank Capacity on the Performance of the Absorption Chiller

Abstract

Recently, solar cooling has taken great attention as the demand for cooling complies with the availability of solar radiation. While solar radiation is variable throughout the day, the need to use a suitable storage system is an important issue. In this study, the effect of different design parameters such as the solar collector surface area and the storage tank capacity for the solar absorption cooling system were studied. The effects of the previous parameters on the operation period of 30 kW absorption chiller (AC) were investigated. Also, the effect of the inlet temperature of the hot water into the absorption chiller on the fraction of the chiller nominal capacity was studied. The TRNSYS simulation program was implemented to simulate the thermal performance of the solar absorption cooling systems in the summer period in Cairo, Egypt (30Âo N). The theoretical results of the simulation proved that increasing the solar collector surface area from 20 to 120 m 2 increased the operating period of the absorption chiller from 2.9 to 11.5 h for June while increasing the storage tank capacity from 2 to 4 m 3 reduced the outlet hot water temperature from the storage tank. Also increasing the inlet hot water temperature to the absorption chiller from 90 to 120 ÂoC has improved the fraction of nominal capacity for the chiller, this improvement depends on the setting temperature of the outlet chilled water, as the fraction increased from 90 to 99 % at chilled water setpoint temperature of 12 ÂoC.