Adsorption Cooling-energy Conversion with Encapsulated Sorbents (ACCESS)

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Cooling energy is a vital foundation of modern society for refrigeration and air conditioning processes of various kinds. Currently cooling consumes up to 14% of the UK's electricity, with an annual cost of more than £5 billion. Therefore only the use of solar thermal energy or low-grade waste heat instead of electricity to generate cold can lead to a sustainable way of cooling. However both present absorption refrigeration and adsorption refrigeration technologies are unsuitable for domestic application due to their complexity and inefficiency.This project will develop a new adsorption approach that combines the advantages of absorption processes and adsorption processes by encapsulating the liquid sorbents. The encapsulated sorbents offer not only a much higher sorption quantity but also a much higher sorption rate, which in combination enables the adsorption refrigeration system to be more compact and efficient for domestic applications.This project will address different levels of the scientific and technological challenges of such a new adsorption cooling technology. At a material level a two-step microencapsulation-coating approach will be developed to produce encapsulated sorbents. At the device level, the adsorption/desorption dynamics of a sorption bed based on encapsulated sorbents will be investigated both numerically and experimentally to achieve optimal designs. At a system level, an advanced system will be developed with encapsulated sorbents and related sorption beds. A lab-scale integrated system will also be constructed to investigate and demonstrate its performance for domestic applications.