ABSTRACT
Adsorption technology has already become a key tool that is used pervasively in industry for well-established applications, such as gas separation and purification. Impressive progress has recently been made in a relatively new, although quite close to practice, application of adsorbents for heat transformation that includes cooling, heat pumping and heat amplification. The current state of the art in this specific application was presented in a book (Saha and Ng 2010) and review articles (Critoph and Zhong 2005, Aristov 2007, Kim and Infante Ferreira 2008, Vasiliev et al., 2008, Wang et al., 2009, Choudhury et al., 2010). Various adsorption heat transformers (AHTs) (chillers, heat pumps and amplifiers) have been developed during the past few years, and several chillers have now passed over from the prototype stage to small serial production (Wang and Oliveira 2006, Jakob and Kohlenbach 2010). Despite significant progress achieved, there is still a lot of room for improving this technology (Ziegler 2009), first of all, for enhancing the specific cooling/heating power (SCHP) and, hence, reducing the AHT size. The main challenge is dynamic optimisation of the integrated unit ‘AdsorbentHeat Exchanger’ (Ad-HEx) to enhance heat and mass transfer processes and harmonise adsorbent properties with cycle boundary conditions and HEx design (Aristov 2009).
