Investigating the effect of entrance flow parameters on the COP of an adsorption chiller with four adsorbent beds

Adsorption cycle has become one of most popular technologies in recent years which operates based upon the adsorption and desorption of an adsorptive material in an adsorbent material which is usually a porous solid. Thus, a four-bed adsorption cycle with silica gel-water as working pair is modeled by means of a computer code written in MATLAB software, and thermodynamic properties are obtained from REFPROP software. In this article, in order to consider the heat transfer process more accurately and the heat transfer to the environment from the tubes, the passing flow in the adsorbent beds, evaporator, condenser and the connecting pipes between the master and slave beds are discretized. The next step directs to investigate the effect of entrance flow temperature to the adsorbent bed during cooling and heating processes on the operating parameters of system and energy lost. The obtained results indicate that increasing the temperature of hot water and decreasing the temperature of cooling water will lead to the increase of COP and cooling capacity of system. Hence, the best choice based on the maximum available temperature for hot water and normal temperature range for cooling water are 75ᵒC and 25ᵒC, respectively. In these conditions, COP and cooling capacity of system will be 0.37 and 17.2Kw, respectively.