Experimental investigation of activated carbon fibers/ethanol pairs for adsorption cooling system application

The objective of this article is to improve the performance of thermally powered adsorption/cooling systems by selecting a new adsorbent/refrigerant pair. Adsorption equilibrium data of ethanol onto Unitika activated carbon fiber (ACF) of types (A-20) and (A-15) have been measured and Dubinin–Radushkevich (D–R) equation is used to fit the experimental data. The pressure–temperature–concentration (P–T–X) diagrams of the pairs are also presented. It was found that ACF (A-20)/ethanol pair has considerably higher adsorption capacity than ACF (A-15)/ethanol pair. As combined heat and mass transfer plays the most important role on adsorption/desorption processes, the effect of the adsorbent bed apparent density on the adsorption rate is also studied. Experimental results show that the high apparent density improves the adsorption capacity per unit volume of the adsorber which may lead to the design a compact adsorption unit.