Development of a Solar Cooling System Based on a Fluid Piston Convertor

Abstract

Solar water pumping and dynamic water desalination has been developed at Northumbria University during the last few years. These systems are built around the fluid piston converter with a simple design and made of low cost materials. In water pump and desalination systems, the fluid piston converter works as an engine driven by solar thermal energy accumulated by flat- plate or evacuated tube collectors. If in the same design the fluid piston is driven using external source of energy without heat input then such a converter works as a cooling device. In this study, the solar fluid piston converter/engine is coupled with the cooling unit and the fluid piston of the latter is driven by the solar fluid piston converter/engine. The resulting effect is producing cooling effect using solar energy. The operation of such system has been investigated theoretically and experimentally. The thermodynamic model, consisting of a system of ordinary differential equations, was developed in MATLAB/Simulink environment to simulate the operation of this thermal auto-oscillation system. The theoretical results confirm that it is possible to achieve the temperature of the working fluid in the cycle which is below the ambient temperature and that the cooling effect depends on the operational parameters of the engine part of the system.



Author Information
Khamid Mahkamov, Northumbria University, UK
Gamal Hashem, Northumbria University, UK

Paper Information
Conference: ECSEE2015
Stream: Energy: Renewable Energy and Environmental Solutions

This paper is part of the ECSEE2015 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon