Energy Analysis Of A Solar-Driven Hybrid Air Conditioning System With An Absorption Heat Pump And A Desiccant Evaporative Cooling System
Abstract
In this paper, it is presented an air conditioning system with a solar driven single-effect absorption heat pump with condensation heat recovery and an air-handling unit with a desiccant wheel and an evaporative cooler. The integration of both cooling technologies allows for achieving a good overall performance as the desiccant system handles the latent loads and the absorption chiller the sensible loads. Moreover, the desiccant system is activated with the heating provided by the condensation heat from the absorption heat pump, which minimizes the amount of heating that must be provided by a solar concentrator coupling flat sun-tracking mirrors to fixed-tilt evacuated tubular collectors. The size and the operational conditions of the integrated system are selected in order to optimize the overall performance of the system under different ambient conditions (solar radiation, ambient temperature and ambient humidity ratio). An overall thermal COP of 1.23 is reached in the hybrid system.