Recent advances in building air conditioning systems

Conventional cooling systems are responsible for large amounts of CO, release to the environment as well as for the use of harmful refrigerants regarding the greenhouse effect and the ozone depletion potential. So research has been carried out in order to find out new cooling systems that are free of those problems. This work is a review of cooling systems discussing both classical and more advanced technology emerging from recent research, with a respect to their general operating principles and their applications. Special attention is paid to solar cooling. However focus will not be given to individual systems components as they change very often in design in order to get even better efficiencies. In this paper a classification of cooling systems is presented according to the final energy used to operate them. (c) 2006 Published by Elsevier Ltd.