Performance of Solar Adsorption Cooling System with Different Solar Collectors Technologies

The use of different solar collector technologies to operate the adsorption chiller unit is the topic of this article. As the selection of the appropriate solar collector is still random, as had used different solar collectors have been used to operate the refrigeration unit. Therefore, a program was designed using TRNSYS to study the effect of using different collectors on the adsorption unit performance. The effect of parabolic trough concentrator, compound parabolic concentrator, and the evacuated tube collector on the thermal performance of the absorption refrigeration unit was investigated in terms of cooling capacity, coefficient of performance, and the operating period of the adsorption chiller during the summer climatic conditions of Cairo. The results proved that the parabolic trough concentrator (PTC) has the best effect on the performance of an adsorption unit of 7 kW cooling capacity, where the maximum outlet collector temperature was 102 degrees C compare to 95.8 and 87.3 degrees C for the Compound Parabolic Concentrator (CPC) and the Evacuated Tube Collector (ETC) respectively. For solar collectors of 20 m(2), the weekly operation periods were 47, 32.24, and 25.75 hours for the PTC, CPC, and ETC respectively. These values increase with increasing the collector area. Also, for different storage tank capacities, the PTC has the best effect on the operation period of the adsorption unit compare to the other solar collectors. Where the operation period increases from 96.25 to 124.25 h with increasing the storage tank capacity from 2 to 6 m(3).