Design and Modelling of a Cooling Unit by Adsorption Geothermal Heat Pump in a Tropical Climate Zones

Abstract

This work is a contribution of a modelling of air conditioner by adsorption for a habitat in a tropical climate. The system mainly consists of a captor adsorber powered by a geothermal pump, a condenser and an evaporator. We use the zeolite/methanol couple and the different thresholds temperatures to define the thermodynamic system cycle. Moreover, we use a methodology based on nodal approach to establish heat and mass transfer equations. Dubinin-Astakhov thermodynamic model is employed to express the mass adsorbed, the coefficient of performance (COP) and the cold production. We make use of the climatic data in Comoros for 2009-2019 period to obtain the ambient temperature. The model validation is done by comparing the shape of the cycle we obtain with the state of the art. First, the results show a relationship between temperature, pressure and adsorbed mass. The increase in temperature is accompanied by an increase of pressure and an increase of adsorbed mass, and in the same way a decrease in the temperature causes a decrease of the pressure as well as a decrease of adsorbed mass. The mixture zeolite/methanol reaches 356K at the regeneration temperature with an input water temperature of 363K. We observed the influence of main important parameters on the mixture temperature such as fluid input temperature, fluid velocity or zeolite thermal conductivity. Finally, we show the thresholds temperatures influence on the COP and the cold production at evaporator.