A novel parametric performance analysis of hybrid refrigeration cycles with mechanical and adsorption compression

One of the important technologies that suffer from environmental issues and huge energy consumption is the use of vapor compression cooling cycle (VCC). Therefore, new technologies that use new energy sources should be considered in the cooling industries. One of these new technologies is the adsorption cooling cycle (ACC) which is regarded as one of the most promising methods to overcome the disadvantages of using the VCC systems regardless of ACC low-performance values. Many improvements and progress have recently been applied to increase the effectiveness of the adsorption cooling system. In this study, the (VCC) is combined with the (ACC) to form one cooling system. The difference between the two cooling systems is the compression type. The VCC system uses mechanical compression, while the ACC system utilizes thermal compression. A mathematical code was written and validated to investigate the combined cooling system performance at different operating conditions as the primary goal of this study. In the first part of this study, the performance and energy saving of the proposed combined cooling system were investigated considering the exergy concept using different refrigerants in the VCC unit and silica gel/water pair in the ACC unit. The main goal was to reveal the best refrigerant that provides the highest performance and energy-saving and investigate the relationship between the adsorbent mass and the adsorption cycle time at different VCC evaporator temperatures. In the second part, the coefficient of performance (COP) and the specific cooling power (SCP) of the ACC system were investigated using four different adsorbents at several ACC evaporator and heating temperatures. In the third part, the performance of two different (ACC-VCC) combined cooling system configurations (series and parallel) were evaluated utilizing three different adsorbents in the ACC unit at different ACC evaporator temperatures considering several ambient temperatures and the adsorption cycle durations.