Development and Performances Overview of Ammonia-water Absorption Chillers with Cooling Capacities from 5 to 100 kW

From 2010 to 2015, three similarly design based absorption chillers have been developed, manufactured and characterized on test benches. The chillers are all ammonia-water thermally driven single effect chiller. They are intended to operate using directly solar thermal energy or using waste heat from Concentrated Solar Plant (CSP). The first one is a laboratory prototype, fully instrumented with a cooling capacity of 5 kW. The second one is a pre-industrial version of the first prototype with the same cooling capacity but less instrumented and with a compact design. The last development is a 100 kW cooling capacity chiller, with technical choices between the two first prototypes, but design to provide cooling effect at temperatures suitable from air-conditioning to ice making. In this paper, the design principles and the technological choices made for each chiller are described and a comparison of the experimental results is done.