Techno-economic optimization and improvement of combined solar-powered cooling system for storage of agricultural products

Abstract

In agricultural areas with hot and arid weather, the losses of agricultural products increase due to a failure to access the appropriate cold storage. In the agricultural area far from the network, the solution would be solar-powered absorption chillers. This paper aims at the design optimization and improvement of the combined solar-powered cooling system to meet the required yearly cooling load for remote areas; considering the effect of different types of ETCs and cold storage volume on the performance of a solar-assisted absorption chiller. Such a system has been implemented in Anand, India and it supplies the cold demand of a 5 TR cold storage. A comparison of the system with different collectors shows that when the system is integrated with HP-ETC, the system performance is much more effective. HP-ETCs present 16.6% and 6.2% higher efficiency compared with the efficiency of the FP-ETC and U type-ETCs. The optimization shows that a 4 TR chiller with HP-ETC, a cold storage of 3 m3, and an operational temperature of 82.5 °C would efficiently supply the required cooling demand. Such a system would be able to keep 180 and 85 tonnes of potato and apple per year with a payback ratio of 11 years.