Evaluation on performance of solar adsorption cooling of silica gel and SAPO-34 zeolite

As a technology of the green energy utilization, solar adsorption cooling is a promising way to make use of the solar energy in the future. Aiming to the efficiency improvement of such kind system, the performance of the solar adsorption cooling system that employed the silica gel-water as the working pair was evaluated experimentally. With a mono-axial solar collector of tracking parabolic trough to provide the heat supply to the adsorption bed, the effect of the adsorption time on the system performance was mainly addressed in the study. The experimental results revealed that the performance of the system reached the maximum as the adsorption time was 45 min. Correspondingly, the coefficient of performance of the system reached 0.258. In addition, a comparison of the optimal performance of the silica gel system to the SAPO-34 zeolite system was conducted. It was revealed that both the cooling capacity and the performance coefficient of the silica gel system depended more strongly on the adsorption time than those of the SAPO-34 zeolite system did. At the optimal adsorption time, the coefficient of performance of the silica gel system was 1.93 times as that of the SAPO-34 zeolite system. In general, the silica gel-water pair has shown better performance as compared to the SAPO-34 zeolite-water pair as used in the solar adsorption cooling system.

Automated summary

This study evaluated the performance of a solar adsorption cooling system using a silica gel-water working pair, finding optimal performance at an adsorption time of 45 minutes. Comparison with a SAPO-34 zeolite-water system showed that the silica gel system outperformed at the optimal adsorption time.