Air Conditioning

The air conditioning and heating demand is turning into one of the most significant areas of energetic consumption of buildings, due to the temperature increase and the internal loads. The increase of the power points in the cooling systems during the warmest summer days causes voltage drops in the electrical network and supply cuts.

Nowadays, the solar power allows the supply not just of a building heat demand, as the production of sanitary warm water or heating, but the air conditioning too. This way a measured facility to cover the heating demand throughout the winter can work in summer to supply the needs of the air conditioning, with the following advantages:

This applications turn out to be particularly interesting for hotels, shopping centers and office buildings, among others.

System description

There are different technologies to produce cooling systems (air conditioning, cooling in industrial processes, product maintenance, etc.) from the solar thermal energy. The next sketch show two  examples, depending of the air conditioning / heating distribution at your disposal: Absorption or  adsorption.

The solar power feeds a thermic cooling machine (of absorption or adsorption) that produces cold water in a analogous way to how its executed by the electric compression coolers, but is a warm water consumption to a 70-90ºC instead of electricity.

The solar field produces warm water that feeds the thermic cooling machine. If simultaneously or in another moment there is heating demand, sanitary warm water or other heat use, it will supply itself directly from the solar system.

An electric compression cooler, a heat pump or a boiler are the supporting equipment that will cover the demand when the solar availability is no enough.

Use advantage of the UHV Collectors from SRB

The most used machines are the absorption ones that come from heat recovery processes and can be found  in simple or double effect configuration ( or paralel systems depending on the heat source and its use). Nowadays are being used simple effect systems that need temperatures around 90ºC and with a COP less than 1 around a 0,7, which makes them more inefficient.

Due to the fact that the SRB’s UHV Collectors work to higher temperatures, its possible to use absorption machines of double effect, which work with temperatures around 150ºC but have a COP around 1,3.

They almost double the machines performance, for a collectors performance drop that will never be half, so with SRB’s technology is possible to make the cooling facilities with solar power more efficient than the current ones.