Technology platform Enerbat - Gas cogeneration, solar heating and cooling

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.

Energy cogeneration is a way to improve global efficiency of energy production systems since it consumes a unique resource in order to supply heat and electrical power through optimal use of heat fluxes associated to power production. Energy trigeneration enlarges the concept to the production of cold also. It consumes a unique resource to produce electricity, heat and cold. Nevertheless, we could go more ahead by substituting a part of the primary fuel resource by renewable energy as solar energy in order to reduce the carbon impact. This is conducted through the use of adsorption refrigeration which needs hot water to produce cold water. However, even if energy utilities are provided with the best efficient way, the final use of energy could make all the efforts fall. Cooling ceilings present one of the best solutions to be coupled to solar cooling since it needs a medium range cold temperature of the fluid in order to avoid condensation if the wall ceiling temperature drops below the ambient air dew point temperature. All these constraints need to be checked experimentally and confronted to numerical simulation. For this purpose, an experimental platform has been developed combining an internal combustion gas engine (cogenerator), a refrigerating adsorption machine, thermal solar collectors and wooden construction split in two compartment, a cold one conditioned by cooling ceilings and a hot one conditioned by heating floors. The platform is completely instrumented. In this paper we focus only on the refrigeration machine for which we developed a simulation model that is confronted to experimental measurements.