Experimental evaluation of specific components working in an environmentally friendly cooling system

Abstract

Solar cooling is an interesting application regarding the use of renewable energy to activate climatization systems. Thermally driven chillers (absorption or desorption systems) use the solar energy to provide heat to the generator of an absorption chiller. In this work, an experimental facility, designed for testing innovative components of a simple effect absorption cooling system, is presented. The study is focused on performance analysis of evaporators and its influence on the overall performance of the machine. Experimental results indicate the detection of some operational difficulties. Due to the particular design of the machine, which contains two evaporators, the distribution of refrigerant mass flow rate is not symmetrical in some cases. Therefore, one of the evaporators could be not operating. This situation explains the decrease of cooling power when it is supposed to have an increasing tendency, according to the thermal power supplied to the generator of the machine.