Comparative analysis of promising adsorbent/adsorbate pairs for adsorptive heat pumping, air conditioning and refrigeration

•Working pairs are evaluated for adsorptive heat pumping, air conditioning and refrigeration applications.•A model was developed to evaluate the performance for different sorption cycles.•Results of simulation showed the importance of selecting the optimal adsorbent for a given application.•Design of the adsorber must take into account both thermodynamic and dynamic aspects. In this study, the most promising working pairs are evaluated for utilization in thermal driven adsorptive heat pumping, air conditioning and refrigeration applications employing water, ethanol and methanol as refrigerant. With this aim, a comparative study was carried out for different currently available (silica gels, zeolites, aluminophosphates, activated carbons) and recently developed materials (composite adsorbents). A simple mathematical model was developed in order to evaluate the performance of various working pairs for different sorption cycles. Among the considered adsorbents, the Mitsubishi product AQSOA®-FAM-Z02, the composite adsorbents LiBr–silica and CaCl2–silica appeared the best water adsorbents for air conditioning and heat pumping purpose, providing heating/cooling COP up to 1.62/0.71 and heating/cooling enthalpy up to 1080/570kJkg−1. Also the LiCl–silica/methanol working pair showed high performance for air conditioning cycles, especially in terms of cooling enthalpy (Qev=640kJkg−1). The composite LiBr–silica showed to be the most promising methanol and ethanol sorbent for refrigeration purpose, permitting cooling COP in the range 0.53–0.59 and cooling enthalpy in the range 180–360kJkg−1. The noticeable influence of the metal-to-adsorbent mass ratio on the sorption cycle performance was also demonstrated, showing that utilization of compact finned tube aluminum heat exchanger types (typical mmet/mads=0.9–1.6) allows a 15–30% cooling COP higher than a traditional stainless steel tube-and-shell exchanger (mmet/mads=2.4–3.1). Additionally, some brief dynamic considerations are done for most interesting working pairs.