Experimental investigation of the heat and mass transfer in a tube bundle absorber of an absorption chiller

Abstract

The design of the absorber of absorption chillers is still subject to great uncertainty since the coupled processes of heat and mass transfer as well as the influence of systemic interactions on the absorption process are not fully understood. Unfortunately, only a few investigations on the transport phenomena in the absorber during operation in an absorption chiller are reported in the literature. Therefore, experimental investigations on the heat and mass transfer during falling film absorption of steam in aqueous LiBr-solution are carried out in an absorber installed in an absorption chiller in this work. An improvement of heat and mass transfer due to the increase in convective effects are observed as the Ref number increases. Furthermore, an improvement of the heat transfer in the absorber with increasing coolant temperature can be identified in the systemic context. This is explained by a corresponding reduction in the average viscosity of the solution in the absorber. A comparison with experimental data from literature obtained from so-called absorber-generator test rigs shows a good consistency. Thus, it has been shown that the findings obtained on these simplified experimental setups can be transferred to the absorber in an absorption chiller. However, a comparison with correlations from the literature reveals a strong deviation between experimental and calculated results. Hence, further research activities on the development of better correlations are required in future.