Thermo-technical behavior of a solar autonomous hot water fired absorption chiller: The case of Adelaide

Abstract

The feasibility of operating a small residential scale hot water fired chiller with solar energy only has not been investigated in previous literature. Instead of designing a pilot plant and monitor how it would operate, one can investigate the thermo-technical feasibility of such system to operate in practice by systemic modeling and dynamic simulation. In this paper, simulation with TRNSYS 17 software is used to show how the individual main components integrating the most techno-economic optimized system would interact together if it sized to operate with solar energy only. The system is sized to handle the space cooling demand of a typical single family Australian house, under the climatic condition of Adelaide in South Australia. The system thermo-technical behavior is investigated by looking at its individual main components, namely: the solar array, the hot buffer tank, the chiller and the cold buffer tank. The results shows two potential technical issues going to be faced in practice, if the system is sized to operate with solar energy only. The two issues are overheating in the solar array due to oversizing it to have reliable solar autonomous chiller, and the slow process of charging the chilled buffer tank due to using small chiller and large chilled buffer tank. For each of these issues, a suitable technical solutions been recommended.