An experimental investigation on adsorption refrigeration system using silica gel-water

The soaring prices of fossil fuel and environmental issues have drawn our attention to the need for, pollution free, reliable and low cost refrigeration. Most of the existing works indicate that Adsorption The literature show that the Coefficient of Performance (COP), driving temperature and evaporation temperature depend on the working pair used, such as activated carbon-ammonia, Silica gel-water, Zeolite- water etc. It can also be seen that in India, research carried out on adsorption refrigeration is rare. Hence the main objective was to characterise silica gel-water, Activated carbon - methanol which are locally available and to validate the possibility of adsorption refrigeration occurring under lab conditions by developing a low capacity adsorption system. The working pair was chosen considering the fact that silica gel has better surface properties (large pore area at the surface of the grain). Based on the characterization results concepts were developed to build a single-bed low capacity adsorption chiller prototype. Performance tests were carried out on the developed chiller prototype. The system has been evaluated for various operating temperatures versus cycle time, refrigeration effect versus cycle time.