This PhD project was set out to improve the performance of silica gel / water adsorption cooling systems using a number of investigation tools. A novel global lumped analytical simulation model has been constructed for a commercialised two-bed silica gel / water 450kW adsorption chiller. It was integrated with a genetic algorithm (GA) optimisation toolbox to determine the optimum operating conditions to obtain the optimum chiller performance. The model was used to investigate the effect of physical and operating on the chiller performance. The model was also used to investigate the effect of various adsorbent bed enhancement techniques that are presented in published literature. An experimental test facility has been designed, constructed and commissioned to study the performance of scaled down adsorbent bed modules. It has been constructed to understand the effect of the operating conditions on adsorbent-bed heat and mass transfer performance. A dynamic vapour sorption (DVS) gravimetric analyser has been used to characterise a new species of adsorbents (MOFs). These adsorbents have strong potential towards water sorption and could replace the currently applied silica gel. MOFs adsorbents have been characterised in terms of adsorption isotherms and kinetics, in addition to its cyclic analysis. It was found that HKUST-1 (copper based MOF) outperforms silica gel with 95.7% increase in the water uptake. Iron based MOF (MIL-100) was found to outperform silica gel for high evaporating temperature application.
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