Experimental investigation on a two-bed adsorption refrigeration system with mass recovery

Abstract

• A novel continuous adsorption refrigeration system was built and tested. • Mass recovery process enhances the refrigeration performance of the system. • The optimal mass recovery time for the refrigeration cycle is 180 s in this study. • The COP of the adsorption cooling cycle with mass recovery (180 s) is 0.122. In a two-bed continuous refrigeration system, the adsorbers often switch between desorption and adsorption states. Due to this frequent switching, the refrigeration capacity is easily wasted, and energy consumption is increased, resulting in generally low refrigeration performance. In this paper, a novel continuous adsorption refrigeration system using mass recovery was built and experimentally studied. Two adsorbent tubes and activated carbon-methanol were used as the adsorbers and the working pair, respectively. The two adsorbers were separately powered by an electrical heater and hot water. Two aspects of mass recovery were researched and compared: the system performance of processes without and with mass recovery and the system performance at different mass recovery times. The results demonstrate that the mass recovery process enhances the refrigeration performance of the system. The coefficients of performance (COPs) of cycles with mass recovery (180 s) and without mass recovery are 0.122 and 0.107, respectively; mass recovery increases the COP by 14.02%. It is also indicated that there is an optimal mass recovery time for the refrigeration cycle, which is 180 s in this study. Compared with those of 160 s and 200 s cycles, the COP of the optimal system increases by 2.52% and 6.09%, respectively.