An Economic Investigation of a Solar-Powered Adsorption Cooling System

Abstract

In this paper, an economic investigation is performed to identify the economic feasibility of a solar-powered adsorption cooling system. In the first step, the system is mathematically formulated, and the solar fraction of the system is calculated. After that, the system is economically optimized for a cooling load related to a single-family house using particle swarm optimization. In order to identify the most efficient application of the system, the cost per 1 kW of cooling capacity is calculated over different cooling loads. The results demonstrated that the system under study is more suitable for small-scale applications. In addition, sensitivity to electricity price analysis demonstrates that the main bottleneck of cost-efficient system design is the initial price of the solar collector. Therefore, in the next step, the former sensitivity analysis to electricity price is jointly performed over different initial prices of the solar collector at two different cooling loads. Finally, by considering the cost of CO2 capture and the amount of avoided CO2 by utilizing solar energy, the environmental benefit of the system under investigation is calculated. The results show that the optimum solution is 13% more cost-efficient compared to the base design. In addition, taking the CO2 capture parameters into account, the environmentally friendly case has 21% more annual cost compared to the optimal solution one. However, this extra cost can be justified through CO2 capture cost.

Keywords

• adsorption chiller
• economic feasibility
• solar energy
• cost efficient design
• particle swarm optimization
• environmental benefit