Experimental investigation of solar photovoltaic operated ice thermal storage air-conditioning system

Under the double pressure of energy shortage and environmental pollution, ice thermal storage air-conditioning and photovoltaic air-conditioning has been applied in refrigeration field. In order to improve application scope and reduce investment operation cost, the ice thermal storage adopted to store solar energy in ice thermal storage air-conditioning driven by distributed photovoltaic energy system was proposed in this paper. Two operation models had been tested by experiment. Research results revealed all of the solar energy accepted by PV array had been stored with ice or cold water. Moreover, the experimental results analysis showed that it is feasible to use ice thermal storage instead of battery bank to store solar energy in the field of distributed photovoltaic refrigeration. In operation mode 1, the average system energy utilization efficiency was 0.525 and the average refrigeration efficiencies η¯rand η¯rs were 0.7292 and 0.0690, respectively. When system operated in mode 2, the average system energy utilization efficiency was 0.3377 and the refrigerator performances parameters η¯rand η¯rs were 4.49 and 0.3875, which were 6.16 times and 5.62 times of the average η¯r and η¯rs under working model 1.