Experimental investigation on energy and exergy performance of adsorption cold storage for space cooling application

•Adsorption cold storage energy and exergy performance was investigated extensively under various operating conditions.•Zeolite/water was used as the adsorbent bed material/refrigerant pair with low grade heat source temperature 70 °C.•Adsorbent was coated on heat exchanger fin surfaces and was used for sorption bed.•Chamber HTF temperature has greater influence on the cold energy and exergy performance than mass flow rate.

The adsorption cold thermal energy storage (TES) system was investigated for space cooling application by considering both energy and exergy analysis. With regeneration temperature of 70 °C, ambient temperature of 30 °C, heat transfer fluid (HTF) inlet temperature for evaporator 30 °C, the cold energy storage density (ESD) achieved was approximately 400 kJ kg−1 with energy efficiency of 44.6%. In addition, the exergy efficiency was 4.5%, and the loading difference was 0.165 (adsorbate/adsorbent). As the HTF mass flow rate of the evaporator was decreased, the evaporator HTF outlet temperature decreased, and the exergy efficiency increased. As the evaporator HTF inlet temperature and the regeneration temperature were increased, the cold ESD, cold thermal efficiency and cold exergy destruction all increased. As the adsorption HTF inlet temperature was decreased, the cold ESD, and recovered exergy increased. The evaporator chamber HTF inlet temperature affected more on energy and exergy performances than that of the evaporator chamber HTF mass flow rate.