An Investigation on the Thermal Characteristics of a Single-Effect Absorption Chiller Subjected to the Input Steam Fluctuation

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation on the thermal characteristics of a single-effect absorption chiller subjected to the input steam fluctuation for an air-conditioning purpose. The absorption chiller driven by waste steam is utilized with the total capacity of 270 tons. The analyzed data are obtained by the field measurement. The results indicate that most measuring parameters appear to be nearly constant with time whereas the chilled water outlet temperature and the cooling water outlet temperature appear to have a similar wave characteristic to the mass flow rate of the input steam. The regression analysis is performed in order to obtain the sine function of these three parameters. The lagging behavior of the cooling load and the rejected heat rate behind the input heat rate from waste steam is observed due to the thermal inertia of the absorption chiller. The energy analysis shows that the average cooling load, rejected heat rate and input heat rate from waste steam is 345.78 kW, 1033.80 kW, 572.88 kW, respectively. The coefficient of performance of the absorption chiller has a high fluctuation from 0.296 to 1.524 with an average value of 0.754, resulted from the fluctuation of the mass flow rate of the input steam. The result indicates that the average value of the residual heat rate is 170.14 kW, which is approximately 10 percent of the total input heat.