Solar Absorption Cooling System for Egypt Conditions

Climate change with Egypt’s increasingly hot weather and its plans towards energy transition, addressing an approach for clean heating, ventilation, and air condition solutions is becoming requisite. This paper examines the potential of utilizing solar absorption cooling systems in institutional buildings by presenting a case study of a proposed solar absorption cooling system for a library building with an area of 4402 m², located at the British University in Egypt. The proposed solution is to replace 30% of the existing conventional air conditioning units with a hot-water driven single-effect absorption chiller powered by solar thermal vacuum tube solar collectors, coupled with a stratified hot water storage tank. The potential area of the solar collectors was calculated to be 856 m². A detailed analysis was done using TRNSYS (Transient Simulation System Software) as a simulation tool, to find that the optimum stratified hot water storage tank size is to be 10 m³; with a specific volume per solar collectors’ area of 0.01 m³/m². The proposed system covers the cooling demand of the library building for 8 to 9 months of the year without an auxiliary heater and saves almost 95% of the electrical energy consumed by the replaced conventional air conditioning system.