IMPROVEMENT OF SOLAR COOLING PLANT PERFORMANCE BASED ON SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENTAL ACTIVITIES

Solar refrigeration for dry hot climates has been achieved by developing a novel concept of high temperature lift solar cooling system. A pilot plant based on this concept was designed and installed for a Tunisian beverage factory in spring 2008. The development of the system concept, the detailed design and the components sizing have been implemented through simulations of the system behaviour using the TRNSYS’s simulation platform. For this purpose mathematical models of the concentrating collector and the absorption chiller were developed and implemented. Results obtained from the monitoring activities of the system’s performance were utilized for the TRNSYS models validation. Therefore the validated models were used for further simulation campaign aiming to define the optimum operating points of the whole system and trace a path towards it’s the plant performance improvement.