Experimental study on a continuous adsorption water chiller with novel design

A newly developed adsorption water chiller is introduced and tested. In the new adsorption refrigeration system, there are no refrigerant valves, the problem of mass transfer resistance resulting in pressure drop along refrigerant passage in conventional systems when methanol or water is used as refrigerant can be absolutely solved. Silica-gel–water is used as working pair and mass recovery-like process is adopted in order to use low temperature heat source ranging from 70 to 85 °C effectively. The experiment results demonstrate that the chiller (26.4 kg silica-gel in each adsorber) has a cooling capacity of 2–7.3 kW and COP ranging 0.2–0.42 according to different evaporating temperatures. Based on the experimental tests of the first prototype, the second prototype is designed and tested; the experimental data demonstrate that the chiller performance has been greatly improved, with a heat source temperature of 80 °C, a COP over 0.5 and cooling capacity of 9 kW has been achieved at evaporating temperature of 13 °C.