The Technical, Economic, and Environmental Feasibility of a Bioheat-Driven Adsorption Cooling System for Food Cold Storing: A Case Study of Rwanda

Abstract

This paper studies the technical, economic, and environmental feasibility of a standalone adsorption cooling system that is thermally driven by biomass combustion and solar photovoltaic energy. The developed cooling package was benchmarked against a baseline vapour compression refrigeration system, driven by grid electricity and the widely investigated adsorption cooling system driven by solar heat. TRNSYS was utilised to imitate the integrated systems, investigate their performance throughout the year, and optimise their designs by employing the meteorological data for Rwanda and an existing cold room (13 m 2 floor area × 2.9 m height) as a case study. The optimisation study for the system revealed that maximum chiller performance (COP = 0.62), minimum biomass daily consumption (36 kg), and desired cold room setting temperature (10 °C) throughout the year can be achieved if the boiler setting temperature, heat storage size, and heating water flow rate are 95.13 °C, 0.01 m 3 and 601.25 Kg/h. An optimal PV area/battery size combination of 12 modules / 16 kWh was observed from the economic, environmental, and technical viewpoints.

Keywords: TRNSYS, Adsorption Cooling, Bioenergy, Food Cold Chain, Solar Energy, Renewable Energy