Study of heat and mass recovery process on the performance of adsorption cooling systems

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.A double-bed adsorption cooling system with silica gel as adsorbent and water as adsorbate was developed and tested and various operating sequence have been tried. The experimental results show that heat recovery cycle will increase the coefficient of performance (COP) and specific cooling power (SCP) by about 41.2% and 15.1%, respectively if compared with basic cycle. Besides, the results also indicated that mass recovery cycle can help to enhance the cooling performance of the adsorption cooling systems as well. The COP and SCP were enhanced to 0.25 and 67.7 W/kg, which were improved by about 47.1% and 40.5% respectively comparing to the basic cycle. The optimized operation sequence for this adsorption cooling system prototype is heat recovery of 37 seconds and mass recovery of 23 seconds. The COP and SCP under this optimized sequence were recorded at 0.34 and 75 W/kg, respectively, which were about 100% and 55.6% increase comparing to the basic cycle.