Investigation of the Effect of Various Solar Collector Types on a Solar Absorption Cooling System

Abstract

A single-effect absorption cooling system was planned and simulated appropriate to a hot and dry climate, and optimization was made accordingly in the present study. TRNSYS software is a very comprehensive program that includes much equipment in its subprograms. For this reason, solar collectors, cooling tower, auxiliary heater, and storage tank used in this study are modeled in this software. The designed cooling system is considered as a market that has a cooling need of 35 kW and has a space of 275 m(2). It was examined in this study that how the performance of a single-effect LiBr-H2O absorption cooling system was affected by three different kinds of solar collectors such as flat plate collector (FPC), Non-tracking concentrating parabolic solar collector (XCPC), and evacuated tube collector (ETC). It was also evaluated that how different criteria such as solar fraction, hot water tank temperature and tank volume, collector area, and collector type affected system performance. In the study, it was noticed that collector area had an important effect on the collector efficiency, heater power and hot water tank temperature. It was found that minimum collector area for XCPC, ETC and FPC collectors were approximately 100 m(2), 125 m(2)and 150 m(2), respectively. Also, depending on the change in the tank volume, significant changes occurred in the tank temperature. The hot water tank volume was raised from 0.5 m(3)to 6 m(3)for XCPC, ETC and FPC collectors, the upper hot water tank temperature decreased about 15 degrees C, 11 degrees C and 8 degrees C, respectively. In conclusion, it has been observed that XCPC collectors perform better to improve system performance compared to other collectors used.