Combination of Experimental and Simulated Small-Scale Solar Air Conditioning System
Abstract
It is now clearly assumed that solar assisted air conditioning is able to decrease CO2 production of building operation. One way to evaluate the energy savings potential is the simulation of airconditioning systems. On the other hand, it is also crucial to assess system performance by experimentations. The operation of a solar cooling system in its real environment is considered here. The objective is to evaluate if sun radiation in our region (Western Europe – Belgium) in summer 2009 is enough for feeding an adsorption chiller, in other words to find experimentally the solar fraction of a solar air-conditioning system in our region. Residential application suits with equipment available in our laboratory. A combination of experimentation and simulation is used because of the lack of sorption chiller in our laboratory facilities. Hot loops are measured while cold and rejection loops are simulated. Thirty-one days were measured; energy flows analysis on the whole period reveals a theoretical solar fraction of nearly 100% but a real solar fraction of 31%. Issues related to the test implementation are emphasized and explained in this paper. Keywords: Solar cooling, adsorption, experimentation, simulation