Heat Current Method Based Modeling and Optimization of a Solar-Driven Absorption Chiller for Residential Houses

The utilization of solar energy is attracting rapidly increasing researches due to its many advantages, and an important application is to satisfy the refrigeration demand of residents with the solar-assisted absorption chillers. However, the simple solar-assisted refrigeration system cannot always meet the cooling demand of residents due to the mismatch between solar power and the refrigeration load. Therefore, the thermal energy storage device is introduced into the solar-assisted system to increase the stability of the refrigeration system and reduce the waste of solar energy. In this contribution, a solar-assisted absorption chiller system together with the TES device is presented and optimized to minimize the operation cost of the system. The system is modeled using the newly proposed heat current method and its global constraints are constructed, which largely reduces the number of the constraints comparing to the traditional equation-oriented approach. Optimization results present that the optimized design of the system reduces the total operation cost effectively.