Reassessment on the application of the embossed plate heat exchanger to adsorption chiller

Abstract

In the authors’ previous work, an embossed plate heat exchanger was proposed to the adsorption bed and results showed that the plate heat exchanger adsorption chiller had a lower Coefficient of performance (COP) but higher Specific cooling power (SCP) than those of a fin-tube type adsorption chiller, which shows high potential to resolve one of the most serious disadvantages of the adsorption cooling system, i.e., system size. However, only one section of the repeating embossed pitch plate was used and a uniform inlet flow condition was applied, which might have caused a distortion in estimated performance. We have reassessed the embossed plate heat exchanger adsorption bed by including the end effect to examine the real benefit of the proposed heat exchanger. The result showed that SCP was not significantly changed, while a 66.4 % increase in COP was observed. The proposed embossed plate heat exchanger adsorption bed is expected to provide advantages in both COP and SCP compared to a fin-tube type adsorption bed.