Experimental study of the effect of enhanced mass transfer on the performance improvement of a solar-driven adsorption refrigeration system

The current work demonstrates a novel prototype of a solar adsorption refrigeration system with enhanced mass transfer based on an ideal basic solid adsorption refrigeration cycle with activated carbon-methanol as the working pair. The working principle of the hypothesis was analysed, and the coefficient of performance (COP) was used to assess the system’s performance. A solar simulator consisting of a halogen lamp light resource array was adopted to provide a light source for heating. Different comparative tests under different input radiation energy conditions were carried out to prove the hypothesis that a lower condensing pressure can be realized by using an enhanced mass transfer method and is good for increasing the amount of desorption. The variations of the adsorbent bed temperature, system pressure and ice production were analysed. The maximum COP and maximum ice-making capacity of the enhanced mass transfer adsorption refrigeration system were 0.142 and 7 kg, respectively. The average COP of the novel system showed an improvement of 35.9% compared with the average COP of the natural mass transfer adsorption refrigeration system when the input radiation energy was not less than 14.7 MJ during a refrigeration cycle.