Experimental Investigation on a Solar-powered Absorption Radiant Cooling System

Solar cooling has been proved to be technically feasible. It is particularly an attractive application for solar energy, because of the near coincidence of peak cooling loads with the available solar power. Currently, most of the solar cooling systems commonly used are the hot water driven lithium bromide absorption chillers. Solar absorption cooling systems are available from various reports, in large capacities up to several hundred kilowatts. In this paper, a minitype solar absorption cooling system was designed and installed in Shanghai Jiao tong University. The system mainly contains 96 m2 solar collector arrays, one absorption chiller with the rated cooling capacity of 8 kW, and a heat storage water storage tank of 3 m3 in volume. The chilled water can be delivered either into fan coils or into radiant cooling panels which are installed to satisfy the indoor thermal environment of the test room. As for the fan coil cooling mode, it was found that the average cooling output reached 3.62 kW during 8 h operation under typical weather condition of Shanghai. With regard to radiant cooling mode, an individual fresh air unit was installed for the purpose of preventing the cooling panels from condensation. Compared with the experimental results of the fan coil cooling mode, the average cooling output of the radiant cooling mode reached 4.47 kW, which increased by 23.5%. Furthermore, the PMV inside the test room was between -0.5 and 0.5, which showed great advantage in meeting the indoor thermal comfort.