A solar ejector air-conditioning system using environment-friendly working fluids

In this paper, the performance of the solar-driven ejector air conditioning with several environment-friendly working fluids is studied. The effect of the fluid nature and operating conditions on the ejector performance is examined. This performance is calculated using an empirical correlation. Thermodynamic properties of functioning fluids are obtained with a package REFPROP7. It appears that the refrigerant R717 offers the highest coefficient of performance (COP). For generator temperature T-B=90 degrees C, condenser temperature T-C=35 degrees C and evaporator temperature T-E=15 degrees C and with R717, the COP of ejector air-conditioning system is 0.408. Using a meteorological data for the city of Tunis, the system performance is computed for three collector types. The air-conditioning season and period were taken for six months from April to September. The daily period is between 8 and 17h. For the solar air-conditioning application, the COP of the overall system varied from 0.21 to 0.28 and the exergy efficiency varied from 0.14 to 0.19 with the same working conditions and total solar radiation (351-875 Wm(-2)) in July. Copyright (c) 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.