International Journal of Refrigeration 28 (2005) 218230 www.elsevier.

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Experimental study on a continuous adsorption water chiller with novel design

Y.L. Liu, R.Z. Wang*1, Z.Z. Xia
Institute of Refrigeration and Cryogenics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 1954 Huashan Road, Shanghai 200030, China Received 2 March 2004; received in revised form 6 September 2004; accepted 13 September 2004

Abstract 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-gelwater 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 8C effectively. The experiment results demonstrate that the chiller (26.4 kg silica-gel in each adsorber) has a cooling capacity of 27.3 kW and COP ranging 0.20.42 according to different evaporating temperatures. Based on the experimental tests of the rst 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 8C, a COP over 0.5 and cooling capacity of 9 kW has been achieved at evaporating temperature of 13 8C. q 2004 Elsevier Ltd and IIR. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Design; Adsorption system; Water chiller; Water; Silica gel; Experiment; Performance; COP

` ` Etude experimentale sur un refroidisseur deau a adsorption a conception innovante

` Mots cles: Conception ; Systeme a adsorption ; Refroidisseur deau ; Eau ; Gel de silice ; Experimentation ; Performance ; COP

1. Introduction As a good opportunity to replace CFCs or HCFCs refrigeration, adsorption refrigeration research has got enough attentions during these years, specially its potential
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C86 21 629 33838; fax: C86 21 629 33250. E-mail address: rzwang@sjtu.edu.cn (R.Z. Wang). 1 R.Z. Wang is IIR-B2 vice president and member of the Strategic Planning Committee of IIR. 0140-7007/$35.00 q 2004 Elsevier Ltd and IIR. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijrefrig.2004.09.004

applications in waste heat recovery, solar energy utilization etc. [1]. Based on this point of view, in recent years, various adsorption refrigeration/heat pump research work have been carried out. Many adsorbent/adsorbate pairs have been used in adsorption refrigeration/heat pump system. Compared with other adsorbents, silica-gel can be regenerated at a relatively low temperature (below 100 8C and typically about 85 8C). The potential for the two-bed silica-gelwater adsorption chiller was evaluated by a number of researchers [26] and has already been commercialized in Japan [7,8]. According

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Nomenclature COPmod the modied COP value according to cooling loss Padsorber pressure in the adsorber (kPa) qcooling,loss the instantaneous cooling loss value (kW) Qcooling,loss averaged cooling power loss during the 480 s adsorption process (kW) Qheating,exp. average heating power supplied to the adsorber (kW) Qref,exp. average cooling power of the chiller (kW) Qref,mod the modied cooling power according to cooling loss (kW) t time (s) Tadsorber temperature in the adsorber (K) Xeq the equilibrium uptake of silica-gel, kg water/kg silica-gel

to these studies, the typical working conditions are cooling temperature of 31 8C, chilled water temperature of 14 8C, heating temperature about 7085 8C. Saha et al. [9,10] have even proposed three and two-stage cycles to utilize more lower temperature heat source like 5060 8C. And a dualmode multi-stage, multi-bed regenerative adsorption system is also being studied by Saha et al. [11] to use heat sources of temperature between 40 and 95 8C. Just like the two- and three-stage cycles, the drawback of this operational mode is its poor efciency in terms of cooling capacity and COP inferior to those of conventional cycles. Simulation results show that the optimum COP values are obtained at driving source temperatures between 50 and 55 8C in three-stage mode and between 80 and 85 8C in single-stage, multi-bed mode. Using silica-gel and water as working pair special suited to be driven by hot water ranging 7085 8C (such hot water are widely available from the waste heat of power engines or solar energy), this paper proposes a novel design of adsorption water chiller. Different from conventional and the above mentioned systems, in which large diameter vacuum valves in the refrigerant circuit are used when water or methanol is used as refrigerant, no refrigerant valves are needed in this system. Thus, the problem of leakage and pressure drop along the vapor channel can be absolutely avoided. One bed, a condenser and an evaporator are housed in one vacuum chamber, which acts as one adsorption unit to supply cooling for air conditioning. Two such units are used to supply continuous cooling load with the shift of the adsorption and desorption phases. The beds, condensers and

evaporators are specially designed to be a compact system. Compared with the systems proposed by Yanagi [12], which used a direct contact condensation and evaporation on sprayed water and Critoph [13], which used many simple modular beds (activated carbonammonia) in an arrangement, this system is much cheaper and more reliable as no extra components are needed. Compared with the conventional two adsorber, one condenser and one evaporator system [28], this novel system needs an extra condenser and evaporator, which makes the chiller have larger volume size than the conventional one.

2. System description 2.1. Silica-gelwater working pair Silica-gel is roughly classied into two types, that is, the micro-pored silica-gel and the macro-pored silica-gel. The macro-pored silica-gel has larger adsorption capacity than the micro-pored at high humidity and the micro-pored silica-gel has larger adsorption capacity at low humidity. So the macro-pored silica-gel is commonly utilized as a desiccant in the so-called open-cycles, which are in direct contact at atmospheric pressure and the micro-pored silicagel is suitable to be utilized in a closed cycle at sub atmospheric pressure refrigeration system. Fig. 1 demonstrates the adsorption capacity of different types of silica-gel and the picture of micro-pored silica-gel in transparent pellet shape used in this system, which is from the manufacturer. 2.2. Adsorber In order to enhance the heat and mass transfer on adsorbers, plate-n heat exchanger is used in this system. Between two sheets of water channel, there are two sheets to insert silica-gel adsorbent. The rectangle ns in both channels are perforated to make heat and mass transfer more convenient. Between two layers of silica-gel channel, mass transfer channel is arranged in. Wire gauze (50 mesh) is used to insulate the silica-gel from the refrigerant channel

Fig. 1. Silica-gel property and picture of silica-gel used in the system.

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Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of heat and mass transfer unit and picture of the adsorber.

and still acts as mass transfer channel for the refrigerant water. Fig. 2 shows the schematic diagram of heat and mass transfer unit and picture of the real adsorber. Nine such heat and mass transfer units are formed as one adsorber. Dimensions of the adsorber are 780 mm!252 mm! 370 mm and the overall heat transfer area is 34.05 m2 (the equivalent overall n area). The micro-pore silica-gel is chosen for this system and the average diameter is 0.51 mm. Four short segments (each about 50 mm long) of the adsorber are left unlled to act as extra mass transfer channel (seen from Fig. 2) and there are about 26.4 kg silica-gel contained in one adsorber. 2.3. Condenser and evaporator The condenser and evaporator are also plate-n heat exchangers. Their conguration is of the same style except that wire gauze is used between the water channel and vapor channel in the evaporator. In the condenser, the water vapor

desorbed from the adsorbent bed is condensed by the cooling water from a cooling tower. The evaporator is specially designed to accelerate the evaporation of water. The water vapor (refrigerant) channel consists of ve sheets of 200-mesh wire gauze attached to the adjacent wall of chilled water channel as shown in Fig. 3. The wire gauze acts as a wick to keep the water in contact with the plates to evaporate. The condenser and evaporator consist of 18 such heat and mass transfer units, respectively and the overall heat transfer area is 4.975 m2 (the equivalent n area). The dimensions are 760 mm!128 mm!100 mm. 2.4. System description and working principles One refrigeration cycle mainly consists of three different working processes. In order to describe these three processes clearly and exactly, each process is depicted in the system schematic diagram shown as Figs. 46.

Fig. 3. Diagram of the condenser and evaporator heat and mass transfer unit.

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Fig. 4. Heat recovery process. Fig. 6. The mass recovery-like process.

In the novel system, as there are no refrigerant valves, at any time the pressure in the adsorber is always determined by the condenser or evaporator, which has relatively low saturated water vapor pressure. The equilibrium uptake in the adsorber is a function of the adsorbent temperature and pressure, that is Xeq Z f Tadsorber ; Padsorber (1)

So any change made to the adsorber temperature or pressure of the condenser or evaporator can lead to adsorption or desorption in the adsorber. To begin with, adsorber A has just nished adsorption and adsorber B has just nished desorption. It must be pointed out that the two condensers are connected in serial, that is, the cooling water rst ows into the condenser A and then enters into condenser B. 2.4.1. Heat recovery process Before switching over desorption phase to adsorption phase or vise versa, the heat recovery cycle is provided for a short period. The stored regenerative heat in desorption cycle is transferred to the adsorber whose step is moving to the subsequent desorption step by circulating the thermal uid water (Fig. 4). To adsorber A, the desorption process begins. At this

moment, as the evaporator temperature is much lower than that of the cooling water, the refrigerant is mainly condensed in the evaporator until the temperature in the evaporator rises close to that of the cooling water. When the temperature in the evaporator is higher than that of the cooling water, the evaporator has no capability to condense and the refrigerant is mainly condensed in the condenser. As the adsorber pressure is determined by saturated water vapor temperature in the evaporator, which goes up while water vapor is being condensed in the evaporator, the temperature and pressure of the adsorber go up during this process (process A/B in Fig. 7). To adsorber B, in the adsorption process, the chilled water does not circulate in the evaporator. The adsorption effect is just to lower the water and metal temperature in the evaporator B to prepare for the next adsorption process which supplies cooling load for fan coils. The temperature and pressure of the adsorber both go down during this process (process D/E in Fig. 7). 2.4.2. Adsorption/desorption process In Fig. 5, cooling water out of condenser B is switched into adsorber B. Hot water from the heat source is switched to adsorber A to supply heat to continually generate desorption in adsorber A. The desorbed refrigerant is mainly condensed in condenser A through the cooling water and then falls into evaporator A directly (process B/ C in Fig. 7). For adsorber B, as it is cooled by the cooling water out of condensers, the adsorption process continues. Then the cooling load resulting in adsorption process is carried out by the circulation of chilled water for fan coils (process E/F in Fig. 7). 2.4.3. Mass recovery-like process In Fig. 6, chilled water circulates between the two evaporators, which makes water and metal temperatures in evaporator A decrease and B increase, respectively, so is the vapor pressure. This effect makes the desorption process inside of A and adsorption process inside of B go on. For the

Fig. 5. Adsorption/desorption process.

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refrigerant. Surely the increased value dx of the cycled mass will increase the cooling output in the mass recovery-like process. It should be pointed out that the mass recovery-like process in this system is rather different from that in the conventional system. The main difference existing in the two systems are listed as follows: (1) In the conventional system, the mass recovery process is realized through opening of the refrigerant valve connecting the two adsorbers. While in this novel system, the mass recovery-like process is realized by circulating chilled water between the two evaporators through switching water valves in the chilled water circuit. (2) The drive for mass recovery in a conventional system is pressure difference between the two adsorbers, while in this novel system it is the temperature difference in the two evaporators. The mass recovery-like process in this novel system is necessary. In the heat recovery process, there is an amount of adsorbate adsorbed by adsorber B, but there is no cooling effect output and the cooling effect is mainly used to lower temperature in evaporator B. This process diminishes the effective adsorption capacity in the cycle. The mass recovery-like process can compensate for the amount of adsorbate lost in the heat recovery process. If there is no mass recovery-like process, the point D in Fig. 7 will be at the position of D 0 , that is, at the other side of the isosteric line C/E and whether it is above or below the line A/D mainly depends on the heat recovery degree. According to processes above, Fig. 7 gives the clapeyron diagram of ideal cycle for the novel system. The assumption must be made that the condenser and evaporator have innite heat transfer capacity. F/A/B/C/D/E/F represents the cycle in the new system while B/C/E/ F/B represents the conventional cycle. If the mass recovery-like time in the new system is long enough, to the utmost extent, the pressure in the two evaporators can reach the same value (point A, D).

Fig. 7. Clapeyron diagram of ideal cycle for the novel system.

adsorber A at the end of desorption process, a sudden amount of water vapor desorbed makes the adsorber temperature decreases accordingly and then increases to the heat source temperature again as the adsorber gains heat from the hot water. The same thing happens in the adsorber B, the temperature in adsorber B rst increases because of sudden adsorption and then decreases to the cooling water temperature again (process C/D, F/A in Fig. 7). The main purpose of this process is to increase the effective adsorption capacity in the refrigeration cycle, which, from this point, is similar to the mass recovery process in a conventional adsorption system, as has been well studied by Wang [14]. The conventional theoretical cycle is described as B/C/E/F/B, the cooling output will be the cycled refrigerant mass multiplied by the latent heat of water. The cycled refrigerant is proportional to the adsorption capacity difference between the adsorption point and desorption point (Dx1ZxFKxC). Due to the mass recovery-like process, the novel system with a cycle F/A/B/C/D/E/F will have more desorption or adsorption. The cycled refrigerant is proportional to the adsorption capacity difference between the adsorption point and desorption point Dx2 Z xF K xD Z xF K xC C xC K xD Z Dx1 C dx , where dx Z xC K xD Z xA K xF is the increased cycled

Fig. 8. Picture of the adsorption chiller and its testing system.

Y.L. Liu et al. / International Journal of Refrigeration 28 (2005) 218230 Table 1 Typical working conditions of the adsorption system Parameters Mass recovery time (s) Adsorption/desorption time (s) Heat recovery time (s) Heat source temperature (8C) Cooling water inlet temperature (8C) Average evaporating temperature (8C) Hot water ow rate (kg/s) Cooling water ow rate (kg/s) Chilled water ow rate (kg/s) Value 20 480 30 85 28 10 1 0.833 0.55

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The actual picture of the testing system is shown in Fig. 8. All the switch valves used in this system are solenoid water ball valves. All the action of the valves and pumps used in the system is controlled by a PLC programmer in the control box, so if the refrigerator runs, no one is required to make any operations. It is a highly automatically running prototype.

Fig. 9. Mass recovery-like effect on Clapeyron diagram.

3. Analysis of experimental results 3.1. Mass recovery-like effect on chillers performance The heat recovery time is determined to be 30 s, which is a fairly long time for hot water contained in the adsorber at the end of desorption phase to be transferred to the other one at the end of its adsorption phase. The mass recovery-like time is set mainly according to performance of the chiller. The typical working conditions are listed in Table 1. The chiller was tested with different mass recovery-like time and the results are demonstrated in Table 2. From Table 2, it can be seen that with mass recovery-like time no longer than 100 s, the chillers performance has diverse improvement. When mass recovery-like time is 20 s, the COP has the highest value. That is mainly because the mass recovery-like time is short and the processes the adsorbers undergoing are close to adiabatic. For the desorption adsorber, desorption heat is from the sensible heat of adsorber and nearly no heat is supplied by the heat source. And for the adsorption adsorber, the adsorption heat makes the adsorber temperature rise, which makes the adsorber have a higher temperature at the beginning of next desorption process. With the cooling
Table 2 Mass recovery-like effects on chillers performance Mass recovery time (s) Cooling capacity Value (kW) 0 20 60 100 3.05 3.556 3.70 3.23 D% 16.6 21.3 5.9

capacity improved, the heat supplied to the system varies little contrasting with the cycle without mass recovery-like time. With the mass recovery-like time longer than 20 s, COP begins to decrease as heat is gradually supplied to the system during the mass recovery-like process. The cooling capacity has the highest value when mass recovery-like time is 60 s. With mass recovery-like time longer than 60 s, the cooling capacity begins to decrease, as there is no cooling effect during this period of time. Fig. 9 demonstrates the mass recovery-like effect on Clapeyron diagram. It can be seen that the mass recoverylike process extends the effective adsorption capacity. 3.2. Adsorber temperature Fig. 10 shows a typical run of the adsorption chiller, in which the two adsorbent bed temperatures, the inlet and outlet temperatures of heating water and cooling water are illustrated. A 1 m3 hot water tank with the maximum heating power of 40 kW was used as heat source in the testing system. The hot water temperature of the tank can be set at any specic value according to actual need by controlling the power box. Fig. 10 demonstrates that the heat source had a rather steady supply for the chiller and the hot water temperature uctuated from 82.9 to 85.8 8C. From the curves, conclusion can be made that heat transfer in the adsorber had been enhanced greatly by using this kind of specially designed heat exchanger because near the end of the desorption

COP Value 0.208 0.276 0.240 0.22 D% 32.7 15.4 5.7

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Fig. 10. Adsorber and heating or cooling water temperature. (1-Mass recovery-like process, 20 s; 2-heat recovery process, 30 s; 3adsorption/desorption process, 480 s).

process, which lasted only 480 s, the adsorbent had the same temperature value as the hot water inlet temperature. As there was little adsorbate (water vapor) released from the adsorbent, little heat was needed to supply the adsorber and there was no temperature difference between the temperatures of hot water inlet, outlet and the adsorber. Result was different when adsorber was cooled by the cooling water in the adsorption process. The uctuation of the cooling water inlet temperature will be explained later, which was mainly inuenced by the condenser. Cooling water inlet and outlet temperature curves demonstrate that during the cooling process, temperature difference exited all

the time and heat transfer from the adsorber to cooling water continues until the working phase of adsorption/desorption was shifted. These differences between desorption and adsorption process is mainly determined by the property of working pair of silica-gel and water and there are temperature differences between the adsorbent bed and heat source or heat sink obviously. The desorption process was relatively quicker than the adsorption process. 3.3. Condensing heat ux in the condensers From Fig. 4, the two condensers are connected in series,

Fig. 11. Condensing heat ux in the condensers. (1-Mass recovery-like process, 20 s; 2-heat recovery process, 30 s; 3-adsorption/desorption process, 480 s).

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Fig. 12. Condensing temperature of the system.

that is, cooling water from the cooling tower rst enters into condenser A. Cooling water out of condenser A enters into condenser B and then ows into the adsorber that needs to be cooled down in the adsorption process. If adsorber A has just nished adsorption process and B has just nished desorption process, then in the heat recovery process, adsorber A begins desorption and B begins adsorption. As at the beginning of the adsorption process, the evaporation of water is rather exquisite, refrigerant water in the evaporator usually rushes up throughout the condenser because of highpressure difference wherein it evaporates. Thus cooling water is cooled down by the evaporation of water (which indicates cooling power lost) and cooling water out of the condenser has lower temperature than that of the inlet. In the next heat recovery process, adsorber A begins adsorption process, cooling water out of condenser A (entering into condenser B) is cooled down by evaporation of water, which leads to temperature of cooling water out of condenser B (entering the adsorption adsorber) decreases accordingly. So the phenomenon of temperature of cooling water entering adsorber uctuating (in Fig. 10) could be explained in this way. Fig. 11 gives the condensing heat ux variation with time in the two condensers. The positive value means the condensing heat ux of the condenser and the negative value means cooling power lost during heat recovery process. It can be seen that the maximum cooling power lost reached more than 20 kW and the time lasted about 100 s. It mainly happened during the heat recovery process and in the real adsorption process, this phenomenon still existed but the effect was very weak. The average cooling loss during the adsorption process can be calculated by the following equation

t Qcooling;loss Z

qcooling;loss dt 480

(2)

where qcooling,loss represents the instantaneous value of t cooling loss, t is the existing time of cooling loss, 0 qcooling;loss dt is the overall amount of cooling loss during the adsorption time, Qcooling,loss is the averaged cooling loss during the 480 s long adsorption time (refrigeration time). By computation, the average cooling power lost during the adsorption process was 2.35 kW. Experimental data have shown that this value nearly keeps constant despite of different working conditions. It should be pointed out here that the modied results of Table 7 are based on this result. If this problem could be resolved, the chillers cooling power and COP can be greatly improved. In fact, this problem has been successfully resolved by the secondgeneration prototype, which will be discussed later. From Fig. 11, the condensing heat ux increases as the desorption process goes on, which reaches the maximum value and then decreases rapidly. It demonstrates that the heat transfer capability of the condenser is enough for the system and it could even be made smaller. 3.4. Condensing temperature Fig. 12 gives three curves to indicate the condensation of water vapor in the chiller, that is, the saturated water vapor temperature in the left side shell, the condensation temperature in the left condenser and the refrigerant water temperature in the left evaporator. At the heat recovery process, the adsorber A begins to desorb refrigerant water and as it has just nished adsorption during the mass recovery-like process, the evaporator has a lower saturated water temperature than the condenser. The condensation of

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Fig. 13. Chilled water temperatures and cooling power output of the system.

water vapor released from the adsorber is mainly condensed in the evaporator and there is little water condensed in the condenser because it has a constant condensation temperature during this time. So during this period of time, the condensation temperature in the condenser keeps constant and the temperature in the evaporator increases until it reaches that of the condensation temperature of the condenser, then condensation mainly happens in the condenser. The condensed liquid falls directly into the evaporator and causing the temperature in it increase along with the process of desorption. From the saturated water vapor temperature, the largest amount of desorption happens not in the heat recovery process but later than that and it is mainly condensed in the condenser. 3.5. Evaporating and chilled water temperatures In Fig. 13, cooling power of the chiller, chilled water inlet and outlet temperature of the chiller and saturated water vapor temperature of the right side unit are demonstrated. A 0.1 m3 small water tank with ve electric heaters (which have the heating capacity of 9 kW in total)

simulates the cooling load and offsets cooling power generated by the chiller. The heaters were controlled by the computer program in order to obtain constant temperatures of the chilled water exiting the small load tank and circulating towards the evaporator. By varying the heating power of the heaters, the evaporating temperature of the chiller can be regulated accordingly. The pump that supplies cooling to the tank runs all the time. From the cooling power output, it can be seen that though there is no cooling generated during the heat recovery and mass recovery-like process, the chiller has a rather continuous cooling output except that only one point is below zero, which is due to cooling storage in the little tank attached to the chiller that mainly used for mass recovery-like process. Just because of the cooling storage effect of the little tank, the maximum cooling power output does not happen at the beginning of adsorption like other adsorption systems. To control the heating coils in the tank, the chilled water inlet temperature of the chiller can be stabilized at 13 8C and the average chilled water outlet temperature of the chiller is about 10 8C. The average evaporating temperature is about 7 8C.

Table 3 Performance of the rst prototype (heat source temperature 85 8C, cooling water inlet temperature 28 8C) Average evaporating temperature inside the evaporator (8C) 5 7 10 12 15 Average chilled water outlet temperature (8C) 7.9 10 12.8 15.2 18.3 Chilled water inlet temperature (8C) 12 14 16 18 21 Cooling capacity (kW) COP

2.02 3.56 5.07 6.42 7.34

0.198 0.257 0.350 0.404 0.419

Y.L. Liu et al. / International Journal of Refrigeration 28 (2005) 218230 Table 4 Performance of the rst prototype (heat source temperature 85 8C, average evaporating temperature 7 8C) Average cooling water inlet temperature (8C) 25 26 28 30 32 Cooling capacity (kW) 5.81 4.70 3.27 2.79 2.27 COP 0.365 0.320 0.276 0.212 0.188

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3.6. Performance of the chiller With the hot water inlet temperature being at 85 8C and the cooling water inlet temperature being at 28 8C, the chiller is tested at different evaporating temperatures and the results are listed in Table 3. It can be seen that the chiller has very high cooling capacity when evaporating temperature is higher than 10 8C. When the evaporating temperature is 15 8C, the cooling capacity reaches 7.3 kW. If this chiller is used in conventional air conditioning system that latent heat is also handled by the same chiller (evaporating temperature being 510 8C), it has a cooling capacity of 25 kW and a COP value of over 0.2. If it is used in the hybrid system in which latent heat could be handled by additional dehumidication equipment such as desiccant wheel (evaporating temperature about 15 8C), it has a cooling capacity of 7 kW and a COP value of over 0.4, which has very large application potentials. The condensing temperature is critical in adsorption refrigeration, so is the adsorption temperature. The refrigerator is tested at various cooling water inlet temperature and the results are shown in Table 4. The working conditions are the same as those in the Table 1 except that the evaporating temperature is 7 8C (chilled water inlet temperature is stabilized at 14 8C and the average chilled water outlet temperature is 10 8C) and the cooling water inlet temperature is variable. Both cooling capacity and COP decrease rapidly with the increase of the cooling water inlet temperature. When the cooling water inlet temperature rises up to 32 8C, the cooling capacity and COP decreases to 2.3 kW and 0.19, respectively.
Fig. 14. The newly developed adsorption water chiller (the secondgeneration).

4. The second generation prototype Aiming at solving the problems that exists in the rst prototype, the second prototype is designed and manufactured to improve the performance, shown as in Fig. 14. The measures taken mainly include: (1) The six heat exchangers (two beds, two condensers and two evaporators) are enclosed in the outer shell and the outer shell is welded as a whole unit except that the outlets and inlets of the heat exchangers are left outside. For the rst prototype, the heat exchangers and the outer shell are connected by ange and the heat exchangers can be pulled out from the shell if necessary, which is difcult for the system to keep high vacuum. (2) The condensers, which in the rst prototype are platen heat exchangers, are shell and tube heat exchangers to decrease the amount of water (refrigerant) attached to the plates in the process of desorption so that all water released from the bed can fall down to the evaporator. (3) The mass transfer manner in the beds is also altered to enhance the mass transfer in the beds. (4) The bafe that placed between the evaporator and condenser to prevent water rushing up at the beginning of adsorption is altered and redesigned to minimize cooling loss. The primary test for the second prototype is nished now and the performance results are rather better than the rst

Table 5 Primary test of the second prototype (heat source temperature about 80 8C, cooling water inlet temperature 25 8C) Average evaporating temperature inside the evaporator (8C) 5 7 10 13 Average chilled water outlet temperature (8C) 7.7 9.8 12.9 15.7 Cooling capacity (kW) 4.3 5.93 7.13 9.02 COP 0.302 0.369 0.423 0.504

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Table 6 Experimental results of the conventional water chiller [5] Cooling water inlet temperature Hot water in Chilled water in 85 8C 14 8C 32 8C COPexp. 0.28 30 8C COPexp. 0.34 25 8C COPexp. 0.40

one. The results are demonstrated in Table 5. The average heat source and cooling water temperature is respectively, 80.6 and 25 8C and the other working conditions are just the same as that in Table 1. For the rst prototype (seen from Table 4), at the working conditions of heat source temperature being 85 8C and cooling water inlet temperature being 25 8C and the other working conditions are the same as that in Table 1, the cooling capacity is about 5.8 kW and COP is 0.365. From Table 5, conclusion can be made that the performance of the second prototype with the heat source temperature being 80.6 8C is just the same as that of the rst prototype working with a heat source temperature of 85 8C. With a heat source of 80 8C, 9 kW cooling with a COP over 0.5 could be supplied at evaporation temperature of 13 8C. From the result in Tables 7 and 8, in which, the two generation prototypes have the identical working conditions, conclusion can also be made that, the performance has been highly improved by the second-generation prototype.

For the novel system studied in this paper, the experimental results with similar working conditions as those of the conventional chiller are picked out from Tables 3 and 4 and are demonstrated in Table 7. The original results are from the real cooling output into the load tank during the experiment and the modied results are based upon the cooling loss during the heat recovery process (Section 3.3). The modied results are calculated as follows: Qref;mod: Z Qref;exp: C Qcooling;loss !480 530 (3)

where Qref,mod means the modied results, Qref,exp. is the experimental results, Qcooling,loss means cooling loss averaged during the 480 s long adsorption time (Eq. (2)), the second item on the right side means cooling loss averaged during the cycle time (480 s long desorption/adsorption time, 30 s long heat recovery time and 20 s long mass recovery-like time). COPmod Z Qref;mod Qheating;exp: (4)

5. Performance comparison of this novel system and the conventional system The two-bed conventional adsorption water chiller using silica-gel and water as working pair has been commercialized in Japan. And this kind of system has been extensively studied by the team of Kashiwagi. The experimental results with similar working conditions of both chillers are picked out here to compare with each other. As the SCP (specic cooling capacity) of silica-gel and water adsorption chiller has never been reported in the literatures, the comparison is made mainly according to COP. For the two-adsorber, one condenser and one evaporator conventional system, with the heat recovery time being 30 s and adsorption/desorption time being 420 s, Table 6 demonstrates the experimental results [5] (the original position for these data can be found in Table 6 in the literature).

From the results in Tables 6 and 7, conclusion can be made that the performance of the rst prototype with heat recovery and mass recovery-like process is inferior to that of the conventional chiller with heat recovery process. The performance of the novel system can be greatly improved when the problem of cooling loss is solved. The modied results demonstrate that the novel system has higher COP values than the conventional system if there is no cooling loss. In fact, this problem has been successfully solved by the second-generation chiller. In order to prove this, Table 8 gives the test results of the second-generation prototype with similar working conditions. These results prove the conclusion that the novel system can improve the COP comparing with conventional systems. But the experiment results in Table 8 are slightly lower than the modied results in Table 7, as the modied method in Eq. (2) is not very precise. In fact, the refrigerant evaporated in condenser has a higher evaporation temperature than that in the evaporator as the cooling water supplying to the condenser is of

Table 7 Experimental results of the novel water chiller (the rst generation prototype) Cooling water inlet temperature Hot water in 85 8C Chilled water in 14 8C 32 8C COPexp. 0.188 COPmod 0.364 30 8C COPexp. 0.212 COPmod 0.374 25 8C COPexp. 0.365 COPmod 0.498

Y.L. Liu et al. / International Journal of Refrigeration 28 (2005) 218230 Table 8 Experimental results of the novel water chiller (the second generation prototype) Cooling water inlet temperature Hot water in 85 8C Chilled water in 14 8C 32 8C COPexp. 0.313 30 8C COPexp 0.361 25 8C COPexp. 0.490

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ambient temperature. So the value of Qcooling,loss evaluated in this way is a little higher. The same conventional system with mass recovery process (using one refrigerant valve connecting the two adsorbers to equal the pressure, that is, the conventional mass recovery process) is also studied by Akahira et al. [15]. The simulation results demonstrate that when hot water inlet temperature, cooling water inlet temperature and chilled water inlet temperature are 85, 30 and 14 8C, respectively, the computed COP value is 0.4. Comparing the results with the same working conditions in Tables 7 and 8, this simulated result is higher than that of the novel system.

(5) Comparison results of the two kinds of system demonstrate that the novel system has a higher performance than the conventional ones with heat recovery process.

Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China under the contract No. 50225621.

6. Conclusions Experiments are carried out on a continuous adsorption chiller with novel design, in which adsorber, evaporator and condenser are enclosed in one shell to form one unit, two such units form one adsorption chiller. The most promising thing is that no vacuum valves are needed. The results demonstrate that this new prototype is very suitable to use low temperature heat source ranging 7085 8C. Through analysis of the experimental data, conclusions can be drawn as follows: (1) The heat transfer capability has been greatly enhanced by using plate-n heat exchangers as adsorber, condenser and evaporator. (2) A mass recovery-like process has been suggested to improve the performance and the little chilled water tank mainly used for mass recovery-like process, has some ability to store cooling during adsorption process, so the system could continuously supply cooling during the heat recovery and mass recovery-like process. (3) The chiller (26.4 kg silica-gel in each adsorber) can supply cooling capacity ranging 27.3 kW and COP ranging 0.20.42 according to different evaporating temperatures. (4) The test results of the second prototype demonstrated that the performance has been highly improved. The second chiller with heat source temperature being 80.6 8C has the same performance as the rst chiller with heat source temperature being 85 8C. With the similar working conditions in Tables 7 and 8, the COP has been highly improved, which demonstrated that the problem existing in the rst prototype has been successfully solved.

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