Experiment verified simulation study of the operating sequences on the performance of adsorption cooling system

Abstract

© 2015, Tsinghua University Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. In this study, simulation was conducted to investigate the effect of heat recovery, mass recovery, pre-heating and pre-cooling processes and their combinations on the system performance of a double-bed adsorption cooling system. The model developed consists of pressure variations and detailed compressible flow with flow resistance, which other similar studies had not taken into consideration, thus a detailed simulation of mass recovery, and pre-heating and pre-cooling processes is included in this study. A double-bed adsorption cooling system with silica gel and water as adsorbent-adsorbate pair was built for verifying the simulation models. Based on the simulation results, it was found that the basic cycle provided a COP and SCP of 0.20 and 57.6 W/kg, respectively. By conducting heat recovery for 30 seconds, the COP was increased by 20% to 0.24 compared to the basic cycle. The SCP was also increased to 66.4 W/kg, a 15% increase. The major advantage through conducting the mass recovery is in the SCP, whereby it was increased by 40% to 80.8W/kg. Additionally, performing only the pre-heating and pre-cooling process can also bring some benefits to the system. Therefore, for adsorption cooling systems that cannot carry out the mass recovery and/or heat recovery cycles, performing pre-heating and pre-cooling process only is recommended. This not only can reduce the cost, but also simplify the control program of the systems. Moreover, mass recovery followed by pre-heating and pre-cooling cycle is highly preferred when the SCP is the optimization target, since the SCP was hugely increased by 41% to 81.4 W/kg.