Comparative Analysis of Coefficient of Performance (COP) Correlations of Single-Effect Vapor Absorption Refrigeration (VAR) Cycle

Abstract

Most of the absorbent-refrigerant pairings are evaluated considering single-effect vapour absorption refrigeration (VAR) cycle. The coefficient of performance (COP) based modelling of VAR enables its quick performance evaluation. The development of efficient and environmentally benign fluid pairing is required to replace conventional refrigerants. Operating parameters-based COP models are scarce for single-effect VAR systems, and fewer correlations are available for the COP estimation. The paper compares five performance-based models reported in the literature for operating absorption cooling systems with various refrigerant and absorbent pairing. The comprehensive mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) analysis was performed for five reported correlations for more than 1601 data points of different fluid pairings. Results revealed that RMSD and MAPE values seem significantly higher for the reported correlations apart from the recently developed COP correlation accounted for fluid parameters in prediction. This indicates that the earlier reported correlations only accounted for the specific fluid pairing and could not incorporate different fluid pairing, which has been considered a recently reported correlation that resulted in the significantly improved prediction ability for COP. The finding from this study highlighted that the newly registered COP prediction correlation could be beneficial for developing new single-effect VAR cycles as it accounted for both the operating parameters and fluid parameters.