Numerical and Experimental Study of a Continuous Refrigeration Production System by Adsorption

This work focuses on the design, modeling and numerical simulation of a solar adsorption refrigeration system. The model studied is powered by solar thermal energy and uses the silica gel/water pair. The objective is to carry out a thermodynamic study of the adsorption system coupled to a cold room. The advantage of this device is that it uses a torque that is not harmless to the environment, without noise pollution, a technology that is easy to achieve. The modeling of the system is carried out with the TRNSYS software, and an experimental validation is carried out on the LESBAT platform. The climatic input parameters for the simulation are those of the city of Ouagadougou to approximate the real operating conditions of the system. We present the temperature variation of the prototype of continuous refrigeration production by adsorption. Thus, the solar performance factor (COP) and the cooling capacity (SCP) are the parameters studied to evaluate the performance of the system. For a mass of 22 kg of silica gel, a temperature of the heat sink or condenser Tc of 25˚C and a hot source temperature of 90˚C, we obtained a COP of about 0.7 and an SCP of 200 W/kg.