Using Adsorption Cooling and Thermal Solar Collection for Residential Cooling Applications in Canada

Abstract

An adsorption chiller is a type of chiller that uses heat input as the driving force for chemical compression of a refrigerant and provides cooling with low electrical consumption. An experimental setup was designed, instrumented, and constructed to meet constant inlet temperature and flow rate requirements for the commercially available adsorption chiller unit tested. Two types of tests were conducted, one with a constant hot water temperature which represents a district style heating system and another with a varying hot water temperature, representing a system using flat plate solar collectors. Numerous tests were run with constant inlet temperatures across the complete operating range of the chiller and at varying flow rates for each of the three main inputs. It was determined that variations in temperature had a much more significant impact on the performance of the chiller, compared to the variations in flow rate, which were almost negligible within tested range. Dynamic inlet temperature tests were run using the modified system which uses data from a weather file to simulate a system using flat plate solar collectors and vary the hot water inlet temperature to the system. The results showed that when the average hot water inlet temperature is lower than 60°C and higher than 75°C, the difference in performance between constant inlet temperature and dynamic inlet temperature tests was very small. However, the cooling capacity at 75°C was about 4 kWth greater than at 60°C. Majority of the test produced a thermal COP between 0.45 and 0.50. Therefore, based off the solar collector system’s capacity to maintain a suitable average hot water temperature, the cooling performance of the chiller can be deemed suitable for residential applications.