Investigation on Operating Processes for a New Solar Cooling Cogeneration Plant

Abstract

Some commercial units and industries need more amount of cooling than the power such as cold storage, shopping complex, etc. In this work, a new cooling cogeneration cycle (Srinivas cycle) has been proposed and solved to generate more cooling with adequate power generation from single source of heat at hot climatic conditions with ammonia–water mixture as a working fluid. The operational processes conditions for the proposed cooling cogeneration plant are different compared to the power-only (Kalina cycle system) system and cooling-only (vapor absorption refrigeration) system. This work focused to generate the optimum working conditions by parametric analysis from thermodynamic point of view. An increase in cycle maximum temperature is only supporting the power generation but not the cooling output. Cooling output is also 15 times more than power generation. So, it has been recommended to operate the integrated plant with low temperature heat recovery. The resulted cycle thermal efficiency, plant thermal efficiency, specific power, specific cooling, cycle power efficiency, cycle coefficient of performance (COP), and solar collector's specific area are 27%, 10%, 15 kW, 220 kW, 1.8%, 0.25, and 10 m2/kW, respectively.