Cooling Load Production in Sorption Cycles Supplied by a Geothermal Heat Source for Air Conditioning Systems

Abstract

Direct integration of geothermal system to the absorption or adsorption chillers would expand the spectrum of applications, giving the opportunity to create geothermal heat utilisation more complex. Thermodynamic, chemical and physical properties study is required to describe sorption cycles, with the aim to obtain the most effective operating conditions and reliable co-operation with air conditioning system.
This work gives an overview of sorption technology for cold production. Chillers utilise low temperature geothermal heat as the driven energy directly, minimizing electrical energy consumption in air conditioning system. Authors focused the investigations on absorption cooling cycle based on geothermal heat source.
Engineering Equation Solver (EES) was used to write a code involving modules for each significant physical component of the system. The purpose was to make thermal and fluid-flow calculations and analyse the relationships between internal parameters of a single-stage 10 kW LiBr-water absorption cycle, and the influence on COP. A model was designed and then tested for two variants of a 10 kW cooling machine. The results were applied to an advanced 500 kW chiller unit design for a district cooling system. Calculations are based on the geothermal conditions and data from Geotermia Stargard.