Study of a micro absorption heat pump system

Micro absorption heat pump systems can be used in various new applications. A laboratory scale micro absorption heat pump system was established based on recent fundamental research on heat and mass transfer at microscale. Devices including microevaporator, microcondenser, expansion channel, etc. were fabricated via microfabrication technologies. Cooling was successfully generated and the performance of the established system was investigated experimentally. It was observed that with the evaporation temperature ranging from 11 to 19 °C, COP of the micro absorption heat pump system was about 0.465–0.479 for the fixed condensation temperature of 45 °C. While the condensation temperature increased from 39 to 50 °C, COP of the micro absorption heat pump system decreased from 0.511 to 0.489 when the evaporation temperature was 19 °C. The results demonstrated the feasibility of developing micro absorption heat pump systems. Further to generating cooling, other critical issues for the application of micro absorption heat pumps were also discussed in this paper.