Development and comparison of two-bed silica gel–water adsorption chillers driven by low-grade heat source

A novel silica gel–water adsorption chiller (driven by hot water of 60–90 °C) with three vacuum chambers has been built in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). This chiller was an improvement of an earlier deigned chiller and it integrated two single-bed systems (basic system) with only one vacuum valve. The performance of the chiller was tested and compared with the former adsorption chiller. The results show that the cooling power and COP of the chiller are 8.70 kW and 0.39 for the heat source temperature of 82.5 °C, cooling water temperature of 30.4 °C and chilled water outlet temperature of 12 °C. For a higher chilled water outlet temperature of about 16 °C, the COP increases to 0.43 while the cooling power is about 11.0 kW. Compared with that of the former chiller, the COP of this chiller increases by 20%.