An evaluation of the technologies for heat recovery to meet onsite cooling demands

Abstract Recent years have shown how good energy management is of vital importance for a sustainable progress in developing countries. Among the others, cooling and air conditioning have a large impact on the world energy demand, thus offering room for improvement in the development of efficient solutions. Low grade waste heat is available in large quantities from many different sources, and the capability to harvest such energy and convert it into cooling power could offer an alternative and efficient way to provide the same service. This paper provides a scoring method to assess the overall performance of various heat-to-cool systems, going through the whole process of conversion. First, Organic Rankine Cycles and Thermoelectric Generators are considered for electricity production; then, Absorption, Thermoelectric and Mechanical Vapor Compression refrigeration cycles are coupled with the previous generators to return the complete system. Analytical models have been developed to study the Conversion Ratio of the different systems, using a fixed set of boundary conditions. Three performance parameters such as Coefficient of Performance (COP), Cooling Power Flux (CPF) and specific investment cost (SIC) were considered; data for the three parameters have been used to build a scoring matrix which returns a single performance index. A weightage is applied to the three parameters in order to simulate different scenarios and quantify the compatibility of the technologies considered in each case.