Daily cooling of one-story buildings using domed roof and solar adsorption cooling system

•A new solar cooling system is studied.•The room inlet temperature remains almost constant during operation of the system.•System's cooling production is less in the humid climate.•The solar system consumes 45% less electric energy than a split inverter air conditioner in daytime.

This study investigates a new system which utilizes a solar driven adsorption chiller to provide natural cooling of a one-story building with domed roof, theoretically. The domed roof provides natural ventilation, and the ambient air flowing into the building is cooled in a cooling channel with the assistance of the adsorption chiller. The influence of geometric parameters such as the size of the inlet and outlet vent, and the depth of the cooling channel on air change per hour (ACH) is studied. In addition, the room temperature is evaluated for different values of room cooling demand and ACH, under different ambient conditions. The system's ability to provide thermal comfort in the room is also investigated. The results show that ACH can be controlled by changing the size of the inlet air vent. It is also found that adaptive thermal comfort condition (ATCS) is achieved under larger cooling demand values when ACH goes up. Furthermore, use of three cooling plates in the channel instead of two plates increases the maximum cooling demand for which thermal comfort is achieved, according to ATCS, from 775 W to 1295 W. Moreover, application of the proposed system for cooling of a building in Bandar Abbas consumes 45% less electric energy in comparison with a split air conditioner of the same capacity.

Graphical abstractDownload high-res image (103KB)Download full-size image