Solar chillers for air conditioning systems

Abstract

Air conditioning systems can use heat energy to reduce electrical energy consumption. For this purpose absorption-type chillers are used. In these chillers only 10% of the energy is supplied as electrical energy and the rest is supplied as heat energy. At present, many chillers of this type are manufactured with solar heating devices. As a rule, flat panel solar heaters are used for this purpose. Unfortunately, the highest temperature of the heaters is slightly lower that is necessary for efficient work of absorption-type chillers. For this reason sometimes evacuated tube solar heaters are used to obtain sufficiently high temperature. Trough solar collectors have also been proposed for this purpose. This increases the cost of solar heaters. At present, this cost equals approximately 100 USD per square meter. We have developed a low-cost flat facet solar concentrator that can have a cost of 20-30 USD in mass production and provides a temperature of about 200ºC that is sufficient practically for all types of absorption type chillers. In this paper we shortly describe the design of the flat facet solar concentrator and its possible applications in air conditioning systems.