Development of Adsorber Beds for Air Conditioning in Vehicle Applications

This project set out to design and develop a better adsorber bed for an adsorption cooling system (ACS). The most important characteristic of an ACS is the specific cooling power (SCP), which is defined as the ratio of the cooling power at the evaporator to the product of the cycle time and mass of dry adsorbent. The performance of the ACS is evaluated using an in-situ mass measurement to determine the amount refrigerant that has been adsorbed. A numerical model for the adsorption process within an adsorber bed was developed in ANSYS Fluent with an added user defined function (UDF) module and a comparison was made between the results of the numerical model and the experimental tests. Although the numerical model always over predicts the value for SCP, the results show good agreement. The validated numerical model can be used to predict the performance of the ACS at different working conditions and with different adsorber bed geometries.