Performance investigation of a finned tube adsorber employing activated carbon-ethanol pair

This study presents 2D-axisymmetric heat and mass transfer simulations of a finned tube adsorber employing activated carbon-ethanol as the adsorbent-refrigerant pair. The simulation is carried out with Ansys-Fluent v16.2 and the mathematical model consists of mass, momentum and energy conservation equations as well as confirmed adsorption isotherms and adsorption kinetics from measured experimental data. The simulated temperatures at different adsorbent thicknesses agreed fairly with those measured in an adsorption chiller setup in our laboratory. Moreover performance investigation is performed for heating, cooling and evaporation temperature of 80, 30 and 15 °C, respectively. The cooling capacity reached 245.9 W/kgAC whereas COP is found to be 0.42. The CFD simulation will allow design and performance optimization of the finned tube adsorber for adsorption chiller applications. It can be extended also to different absorber-heat exchanger designs and different adsorbent-refrigerant pairs.