Analysis of the operation and performance of a solar cooling system

Abstract

In recent years, renewable sources of energy have been increasingly sought after to shift the consumption of energy from conventional sources to clean energy sources. A myriad of applications exist to exploit solar, wind, geothermal and any other means to provide the required process. Solar energy systems can either produce electricity or hot water. Solar cooling systems are being installed to provide space cooling or process cooling in locations where sufficient thermal energy is present to operate the vapour absorption chiller to replace vapour compression systems. Thus since sufficient solar energy was incident on the building of the Oenology and Viticulture Research Centre at Buskett, it was used to generate hot water to operate a solar cooling system to supply chilled water to control the temperature of fermenting wine. Prior to the installation, process cooling was provided through a vapour compression system. Initially a control system was designed to operate the solar cooling system. The system could not operate during high solar radiation scenarios and thus significant number of experimentats were carried out to improve the operation and performance of the solar cooling system.