Materials Today: Proceedings 46 (2021) 5639–5646

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Recent progress and outlook of solar adsorption refrigeration systems

Manish Kumar Ojha a, Anoop Kumar Shukla a,⇑, Puneet Verma b, Ravindra Kannojiya a
a
Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India
b
School of Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane 4001, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Solar adsorption refrigeration systems are indispensable in the areas of cooling such as air conditioning,
Received 3 September 2020 ice making, food preservation, medicine and vaccine storage etc in remote areas. It is cheaper than other
Received in revised form 22 September devices and lack in noise and corrosion. It is completely an eco-friendly system which could be driven by
2020
low grade waste heat. Consumption of electricity is very less in this system as compared to other fields
Accepted 24 September 2020
Available online 26 October 2020
due to the elimination of compression process in adsorption refrigeration. Most of the adsorption system
delivers a COP between 0.1 and 0.2 and exceptions are also there. Because of the technical, economic and
environmental problems, researches are going on in these areas. Nowadays it is incorporated with vapour
Keywords:
Solar energy
compression system to make hybrid system in order to achieve a greater COP and efficiency. This paper
Adsorption presents the basic and advanced aspects of adsorption refrigeration cycle and its hybrid arrangements
Cooling with pre-existing system. This paper described the different types of conventional and novel adsorbent
Adsorbents – adsorbate working pairs and provides detailed review about the past and present state of art research
Adsorbates in this field.
Coefficient of performance Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Confer-
ence on Innovations in Clean Energy Technologies.

1. Introduction comparison between the absorption and adsorption refrigeration

Nowadays the solar energy is widely used in different areas
such as power generation, carbon capture and storage, solar heat-
ing, cooling and refrigeration [1-4]. The usage of solar power
becomes prominent in refrigeration field. The adsorption refriger-
ation started in 1970 s because of oil crisis, and then in 1990 s
due to environmental hazards caused by chlorofluro carbons and
hydrochlorofluro carbons as refrigerants. The adsorption refrigera-
tion system is a good way to reduce the usage of CFC and HCFC by
exploiting low grade energy such as solar heat, biogas etc as the
driving energy for the system and also helps in avoiding larger
power usage by avoiding the compression process [5]. The mainte-
nance cost for the adsorption refrigeration is very small as com-
pared to a vapour compression refrigeration or absorption
refrigeration system. Adsorption refrigeration system has several
advantages over vapour compression in areas like power consump-
tion, vibration, control etc. The various parameters such as cooling
water temperature, environmental temperature, and solar radia-
tion have high influence on adsorption refrigeration [6]. In a quick
⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail address: shukla.anoophbti@gmail.com (A.K. Shukla).
systems, the later one can be powered by using large range of tem-
perature from 50 °C to 600 °C or even more. It doesn’t require liq-
uid pump or rectifier for the refrigerant, and free from corrosion,
also it constitutes no vibration and less sensitive to the installation
position [7].
The working cycle of the adsorption consists of two sub cycles,
i.e. one for the adsorbent and other for the adsorbate. The adsor-
bent cycle comprises four processes, isosteric heating, isobaric des-
orption, isosteric cooling, isobaric adsorption whereas the
adsorbate cycle consists of three processes, isobaric condensation,
isenthalpic expansion, and isobaric evaporation as shown in the
Fig. 1.
In the adsorption cycle, first the refrigerant gets cooled up and
get adsorbed on the adsorbent bed by losing its energy, then sec-
ondly the refrigerant is pre heated by giving heat to gain the
threshold energy for the excitation of the refrigerant molecules,
finally the refrigerant gain the energy for the excitation and get
desorbed from the adsorption bed. The rate of adsorption and des-
orption will change according to the working pairs used in the sys-
tem. Adsorption occurs due to the action of cohesive forces which
comprises of electrostatic forces, hydrogen bonding between the
molecules which are agglomerated. It is basically a surface phe-

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matpr.2020.09.593
2214-7853/Ó 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the International Conference on Innovations in Clean Energy Technologies.
Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al.
Fig. 1. Working cycle of the adsorption refrigeration [8].
nomenon happens between two surfaces. The process involves
detachment of a substance from one surface to the other one by
accumulation or concentration. The physical adsorption is exother-
mic, liberates heat during the process.
In this paper a detailed study is done on the present state of art
on adsorption refrigeration system to understand the fundamen-
tals of adsorption refrigeration system and research developments
till now and to know the lagging and find the potential research
gap in this area.
2. Performance augmentation of various adsorption system
Experiment on adsorption refrigeration system using ammonia-
water pair found that the refrigerator producing 1 tonne of ice
requires 5 tonnes of carbon and 1.5 tonnes of ammonia [9]. It
was apparent that the mean carbon bed temperature increases
over time from the initial starting temperature of 50 °C up to quasi
steady state value of 200 °C. In another work, a non-regenerative
chiller was designed with two stage which uses silica gel and water
as an adsorbent and adsorbate pair [10]. Silica gel is taken in this
experiment as it has lower regenerative temperature and water
has larger latent heat of vaporization than the methanol. The total
cycle time was 440 s and the result shows that the setup will able
to utilize low temperature solar/waste heat between 40 and 75℃
as driving heat source at coolant at 30℃, the COP of 0.36 was
observed with a driving heat source of 55℃ and at coolant temper-
ature of 30 °C and for stand by the cooling capacity is 3.2 kW.
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of adsorber [6].
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Materials Today: Proceedings 46 (2021) 5639–5646
Fig. 2 shows the schematic diagram of adsorber where, the K
type thermocouples kept at different locations 0, 5, 10, 15, 20, 25
and 60 mm inside the adsorbent bed in order to know the temper-
ature variation around the screw bar and stainless-steel mesh. The
centre of the mesh is passed through the screw bar that makes it to
compress the ACF in adsorber. A nut is provided on the upper side
of the mesh to control the mesh position (Table 1).
Researchers have done many works to improve the cooling per-
formance in different systems, one such work was done by El-
Sharkawy etal. [7] used the pairs Activated Carbon Fibre – 20
(ACF-20) – ethanol and ACF
15 – ethanol to improve the cooling
performance which was driven by thermal energy. The tempera-
ture of evaporator is kept constant at 10 °C and the adsorber tem-
perature is varied from 11℃ to 60 °C by regulating the water bath
and the same procedure is done at 15 °C of evaporator temperature
and finally found that the adsorption capacity of A20 is higher than
the A15. Therefore ACF-20 produces higher cooling rate as com-
pared to the ACF-15. The further investigation on activated carbon
(maxsorb - III)-ethanol pair was carried out by using thermo gravi-
metric analyser (TGA) over an adsorption temperature range of 20–
60 °C at an increment of 10 °C for solar powered adsorption cooling
application [7]. Adsorption rate of ACF-ethanol pair was faster than
maxsorb-3 ethanol pair due to short diffusion particles of ACF as
compared to granular shape of maxsorb-3 and observed a sudden
surge of COP occurred when the increase of desorption tempera-
ture is below 80 °C. The study showed that 1.2 kg of ethanol can
be absorbed by 1 kg of maxsorb-3 and adsorption cooling cycle
of maxsorb-3 and ethanol can achieve a specific cooling effect as
high as 420 kJkg
1. Dubinin-Asthakov (D-A) equation is extensively
used on carbon-based adsorbents to approximate the equilibrium
uptake of gases and vapours.
 n
A
W ¼ W0 exp½
 ð1Þ
E
Where, W is the equilibrium uptake of the working pair; W0 is
the maximum adsorption capacity and E is the adsorption charac-
teristic parameter of the working pair; the exponential parameter
‘n’ is a dimensionless parameter that provides the best fitting of ln
(W) versus adsorption potential (A) and is given by Eq. (2):
 
Ps
A ¼ RTln ð2Þ
P
Where T is the adsorption temperature, Ps is the refrigerant sat-
uration pressure and P is the equilibrium pressure.
Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al.
Table 1
Experimental Conditions for A-20 an A-15.
Adsorbent Evaporator temperature [oC] Adsorber temperature [oC]
ACF (A-20) 10 11–60
15 16–60
ACF (A-15) 10 11–60
Numerical studies on continuous adsorption refrigeration sys-
tem with activated carbon and methanol as working pair powered
by Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC) was carried out and FORTRAN
and Tri-Diagonal Matrix Algorithm were used to find out the
numerical solutions and simulate the results [5]. An amount of
274 g of activated carbon was used with an increase in bed thick-
ness resulted in an increase in COP of cycle and optimal perfor-
mance was found in between 80 and 100 °C. Zhai etal. [11] made
a comparison between two systems i.e. with and without heat
storage with the working pair of silica gel – water and the heating
and cooling time cycle was found out to be 900 s for both the sys-
tems. The system with heat storage showed more stability than the
other due to the regulation of heat storage water tank. In the area
of cooling, both systems went hand to hand and the system with
heat storage has higher solar collecting capacity and electrical
COP. A four-bed adsorption system of jojoba seeds, palm seeds,
coconut shell and charcoal activated carbon was proposed Hamdeh
and Mu’Taz [12] and they selected the activated carbon – methanol
pair as adsorbent and adsorbate. Due to the limited size of the
refrigeration unit, only 900 ml of methanol was used. The mini-
mum temperature obtained by the system was 9 ℃ and the COP
was found out to between 0.18 and 0.2.The difference in perfor-
mance between lab and practical condition can be improved by
improving the refrigerant valve design and refrigerant liquid level
in evaporator and proposed silica gel-water adsorption chiller.
Study also reported that thermal performance increases by using
chilled water and lower heat rejection temperature [13]. Carlosri-
ous etal. [14] had performed experiment by using two concentric
tube the external is vacuum evacuated and the inner tube filled
with activated charcoal and covered with layer of black copper
oxide to absorb the solar radiation. It was found that 100 g of acti-
vated carbon from coconut adsorbed 25 ml methanol and can pro-
vide 3 °C temperature from 22 °C. To gain the lower temperature
Fig. 3. Cross section diagram of adsorbent bed collector [14].
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and higher yield header pipe should be increase. The designed solar
collector can efficiently transfer heat reaching the evaporation
temperature of methanol (65 °C) in 25 min of exposure. Integration
of artificial neural network found that adsorption refrigeration sys-
tem can be modelled with a high degree of accuracy. By using three
criteria (root mean square error, correlation coefficient and coeffi-
cient of variance) performance was calculated and found that solar
COP is very much less than cycle coefficient of performance and
energy absorbed by the water in the absorber of solar concentrator
is only 20–35% during peak sun shining and heat is lost due to high
irreversibility. The cooling performance of zeolite adsorption sys-
tem driven by low grade energy and adsorbent used was FAM
Z01 [15]. The experiment was conducted for a capacity of
10.5 kW. It was found that the zeolite system could be driven by
using low grade waste heat energy which could be as low as
55 °C. The COP of the system could be as high as 0.48 while the
heating source is low grade waste heat of 55 °C. An experimental
investigation was done on two setups with increased number of
alloy fins and enhanced heat and mass transfer with and without
valve with activated carbon – methanol. In which polyethylene is
used to avoid the heat loss at the backside of the finned tube.
The setup with valve showed a higher performance than the other
which gave a cooling efficiency of 0.122 and produced 6.5 kg ice
per day [16].
Fig. 3 shows the cross-sectional view of adsorbent bed collector.
It has a finned tube which stores the adsorbent in several sections
to increase the heat transfer rate of the system. The transfer of
absorbent is restricted to the inner tube by providing a fine mesh.
Polyethylene is provided at the backside of the adsorbent bed to
minimize the heat loss.
A comparison of expriment was carried out with the same
working pair zeolite-methanol and two types of activated carbon
was used, one of that is abstracted from avocado shell [14]. The
methanol system works under intermittent cycle where there is
no heat recovery. 100 g of each adsorbent adsorbed 6.3 ml, and
25 ml of methanol respectively. Authors concluded that the
adsorption capacity of activated carbon is very much higher than
zeolite and gave a system performance of 0.21. An innovative four
bed, three stage adsorption cycle system was made by Abdul Fazal
etal. This design was to improve the previous design, used silica
gel-water as the working pair. A maximum COP of 0.218 was
Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al.
Fig. 4. Schematic diagram of laboratory prototype of adsorption cooling system [19].
observed which was higher than that of the previous one [17]. Use
of magnetic suspension balance adsorption measurement unit
showed the maximum adsorption capacity of H2 treated
Maxsorb-3/ethanol has maximum adsorption capacities of 1.2
and 1.0 kg/kg respectively. In the same experimental setup another
thermodynamic analysis showed that H2 treated Maxsorb-3/
ethanol adsorption cycle can achieve a COP as high as 0.51 with
an evaporator temperature
5°C regeneration temperature
100 °C along with a coolant at 30 °C [18]. In 2015, Du et.al had per-
formed experiment and proposed detail about the design of solar
adsorption refrigeration system with CPC and study on the heat
and mass transfer performance in which the system was based
on composite parabolic reflector panel (CPC), working pair was
activated carbon and methanol [19]. The experiment shows that
the parabolic trough could make the adsorption bed 100 °C with
low intensity irradiation while the non-concentrated adsorption
bed would need more than 900 W/m2 to achieve the same. When
the irradiation intensity was 600 and 400 W/m2, then temperature
rising for desorption temperature were 0.67 °C/min and 0.50 °C/
min, COP were observed 0.166 and 0.143 respectively. COP will
increase with increase in heat and mass transfer. There was a surge
of desorption rate by 4.1% as the irradiation changes from 600 to
400 W/m2 and finally the desorption rate reached 12.5%. In desorp-
tion processes the system pressure got changed in similar trend
but the change of desorption rate was lagging the system pressure
in both experiments. In an experimental study on single bed silica
gel –water adsorption refrigeration system, It was found that by
using hot water temperature 88℃ & cooling water temperature
32℃ the COP is 0.27 for the predicted cooling temperature differ-
ence is 2.5 to 3 °C[12]. In the same year another study used Zeolite
–Water as a Adsorption pair and reported the COP of the system is
ranges from 0.32 to 0.6 at a maximum adsorption capacity of 0.3 kg
of adsorbate/0.85 kg of adsorbent. Author also proposed that the
compression system can be replaced by adsorption system and
solar technology will be brought into the system to make it eco-
friendly.
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In another experiment metal chloride was used as the adsor-
bent and water as the asorbate [20]. The metal chloride used was
a composite of Zeolite 13X/CaCl2 which is good in making use of
solar waste heat. The experimental result tells that it could achieve
a cooling power of 371 W and a specific cooling power (SCP) of
106 W/kg. Fig. 4 represents the schematic diagram of laboratory
prototype of adsorption cooling system. The above system consists
of two phases. The first phase is the adsorption occurrence in
adsorber A and desorption occurrence in adsorber B. In phase II
adsorption would occur in adsorber B and desorption in adsorber
A. In the Fig. 4 the thinner line depicts the water pipeline for cool-
ing and heating applications of the adsorber beds whereas the
thicker line represents the low-pressure pipeline for water vapour
or condensed water.
Activated carbon and HFC410a as adsorption pair achieved SCP
0.2 kW/kg and cop 0.3 respectively at 350 K regeneration temper-
ature and 387 K evaporator temperature [21]. The cycle time has
been recorded to be about 1000 sec. It also showed that increasing
the evaporator temperature decrease the cycle time which lead to
an increase in the SCP. In the same year Dusane and Ghuge [22]
performed experiment by using ANSYS software to analyses the
temperature distribution over adsorption plate for the perfor-
mance and analysis of solar adsorption system in tropical wet
and dry climate zone of India. In summer we get good amount of
solar heat in morning but limited amount of cooling in night and
in winter the situation gets reversed, so the performance of system
depends on adsorption pair, processes and environment condi-
tions. Similarly analysis of two stage solar vapour adsorption
refrigeration system found that at 4 kg evaporator load refrigera-
tion effect is 147.14 W when maximum solar COP is 0.096 [10].
Later on the same system was improvised by using activated car-
bon and ethanol as working pair and found that the maximum
adsorption capacity of ethanol by activated carbon is 0.302 kg/kg
by providing cooling temperature 25℃ and heating temperature
100℃, COP is 0.19 and cycle time is 2 h and 30 min (Table 2).
Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al. Materials Today: Proceedings 46 (2021) 5639–5646

Table 2
Review of adsorption refrigeration systems.

Source System Operating Cycle Working pair COP Remarks

Temp. (oC) time
[9] Ammonia water refrigerator 50–200 °C 180 Ammonia-water 0.31 A refrigerator producing 1 tonne of ices would
working on diurnal cycle sec need 5 tonnes of carbon and 1.5 tonnes of
ammonia
[23] Two stage non-regenerative 30–75 °C 440 Silica gel-water 0.36 Effectively worked at 55 °C with 30 °C of cooling
adsorption chiller driven by waste sec water
heat
[24] Adsorption refrigeration with two 11–60 °C NA ACF(A20)-ethanol, ACF(A15)- 10–20% A20 is better than A15 in all aspects
temperature constant water bath ethanol
and two water circulators
[25] Solar powered adsorption 20–80 °C 600 Maxsorb III-ethanol NA COP increases sharply after 80 °C of desorption
incorporated with Thermo sec temperature and can also absorb 1.2 kg of ethanol
Gravimetric Analyzer per kg of maxsorb III
[26] Continuous adsorption 20–250 °C NA Activated carbon-ammonia 0.43 The variation of adsorbent thickness affects the
refrigeration system with specific cooling power much greater than the COP
parabolic trough collector of the system
[27] Open cycle adsorption cooling 55–95 °C 900 Silica gel-water 0.34–0.35 In this experiment, the system with heat storage
system sec is more stable than the other because of the
regulating effect of heat storage water tank
[5] Solar adsorption refrigeration 9–103 °C NA Activated carbon-methanol 0.2 The lowest temperature was found out to be 9 °C
system with four beds whereas the ambient temperature was 26 °C
[15] Single stage zeolite-water 25–60 °C 300 FAM Z01-water 0.48 Zeolite adsorption could be done with low grade
adsorption system sec heat at 55 °C
[14] Double vacuumed glass Tube of N/A 25 min Methanol/Activated 0.21 It is possible to obtain up to 3 °C
boron-silicate harcoal100 g/25 ml
[28] Artificial Neural network were N/A N/A Activated carbon/R134a 0.334 SCP = 42.5(W/kg)
used for performance prediction
[29] Solar powered finned tube 25–80 °C NA Activated carbon-methanol 0.122 6.5 kg of ice is made per day
adsorption refrigeration system
[17] Innovative Four-Bed, Three-Stage 40–70 °C NA Silica gel-water 0.218 SCP and COP were significantly increased over
Adsorption Cycle whole range of heat source temperature
[30] Small scale sorption chiller N/A 12 min Water/Silica gel 0.5 By using chilled water at adsorber thermal
performance can be increase
[31] Solar adsorption refrigeration 4–65 °C NA Activated charcoal-methanol 0.21 100 g of activated charcoal adsorbed 25 ml of
system under intermittent cycle methanol, managed to obtain 4 °C
[18] Magnetic Suspension balance 30 °C N/A Maxsorb-III/Ethanol1 kg/1 kg 0.51 H2 treated Maxsorb-3/ethanol has the highest
adsorption measurement unit 70 °C adsorption capacities
[32] Solar adsorption refrigeration 20–125 °C NA Activated carbon-methanol 0.143– COP increased as the irradiation increases from
system with compound parabolic 0.166 400-600 W/m2
concentrator
[33] Single bed Silica Gel-Water 32 °C N/A Silica Gel/Water1 kg/0.3 kg 0.27 Selection of adsorption pair for low grade heat
adsorption 88 °C source affect much on system
[34] Two steel cylinders are used. 0 °C N/A Zeolite- Water0.8 kg/0.3 kg 0.32–0.6 Compression system can be replaced by
115 °C adsorption system and low-grade energy can be
integrated, Cycle is very long
[33] Glass tube having sorption bed, N/A N/A Low grade charcoal/Methanol N/A System performance highly depends on
also used ANSYS adsorption pairs and environment condition
[35] Single bed adsorption cooling Below 1000 Activated carbon/ 0.3 Increasing the evaporator temperature SCP and
cycle and adsorption bed has 80 °C sec HFC410a1 kg/0.35 kg COP increases
finned tube type heat exchanger
[36] Two stage solar vapour N/A N/A Activated carbon/Methanol Solar Temperature difference of evaporator during the
adsorption COP = 0.096 cooling process show a decline trend as the
evaporator load
[37] Two adsorption bed as thermal 25 °C 2h Activated carbon/ 0.19 Ethanol/Ac carbon is suitable pair for adsorption,
compressor 100 °C 30 min Ethanol1 kg/0.302 kg and it can be operated at low heat source

3. Adsorbents and adsorbates
By the involvement of forces in the process, the adsorbents are
classified as physical, chemical or composite. The physical adsor-
bents are most used for the adsorption refrigeration. Activated car-
bon is frequently used in several experiments because of its high
porosity and large surface area. Ammonia and methanol are the
adsorbates which are often used with activated carbon. Activated
carbon has the quality of large quantity adsorption and low
adsorption heat. Low adsorption heat is responsible for COP of
the system because of the heat consumption of the system during
desorption is majorly the adsorption heat. Similar effects are
observed on activated carbon and ammonia, but main difference
is the higher operating pressure. This makes the system more con-
cise than the activated carbon – methanol system by reducing the
pipe diameters and compact heat exchangers. Silica gel is a viable
option for the adsorption refrigeration made from sodium silicate
which is granular and has high porosity. Generally, the desorption
temperature is lower than 90℃ (could be as low as 50℃) and a
maximum of 120℃. This is because of the connection between
water and hydroxyl group of silica atom on its surface help in hold-
ing the adsorption capability. Zeolite is a type of alumina silicate
crystal composed of alkali or alkali soil. Zeolite water has showed
a better performance than silica gel – water due to its higher heat
of adsorption (3300–4200 kJ.kg
1). It is very stable at higher tem-
peratures makes them to put up a desorption temperature higher
than 200℃. It is not able to produce evaporative temperature
below 32°F and has low adsorption rate.

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Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al. Materials Today: Proceedings 46 (2021) 5639–5646

Chemical adsorption occurs due to the strong chemical bonds

between the adsorbent and adsorbate and the bond is responsible
for the complexation, coordination, hydrogenation and oxidation.
Metal chlorides and ammonia are frequently used as the working
pair, which exhibits the complexation force. The advantage of
metal chloride over physical adsorbent is the higher adsorption
rate but would adversely affect the system by salt formation and
require more energy for the desorption process. Properties of some
adsorbent and adsorbate combination is given in the Table 3.
Composite adsorbents are used to improve heat and mass trans-
fer of chemical adsorbent, increase adsorption rate of physical
adsorbent. These are complex compounds made from metal chlo-
rides and expanded graphite, activated carbon fibre, zeolite or sil- Fig. 5. The ethanol uptake at Ps/P = 0.9 (Tads = 25oC) [37].

ica gel. It is flexible in nature i.e. the adsorption characteristics

could be changed by changing the structure of pore of silica gel
and by changing proportions of silica gel and chlorides or by alter-
ing types of salts.
Fig. 5 depicts the ethanol uptake of various adsorbents and
Fig. 6 shows the stability time/1000 in minutes. It is evident from
these figures that the maximum uptake and stability is achieved by
maxsorb which is a derivative of activated carbon. The marxsorb
could achieve the uptake of nearly 1.2 kg of ethanol per kg of max-
sorb and the stability time is noted to be 0.5. No other pairs could
achieve the same result, so this strengthens the statement that the
maxsorb-ethanol pair is the best [7].
The Fig. 7 shows specific cooling energy of different working
pair at various regeneration temperature (oC). It can be observed
from Fig. 7 that the ethanol-maxsorb combination provides the
highest specific cooling energy as compared to the other working
pairs. As the regeneration temperature increases the specific cool- Fig. 6. Uptake of several carbon adsorbents vs stability time/1000 [min].

ing energy of maxsorb-ethanol pair increases significantly. The

best result is that the pair could achieve a specific cooling energy of high reactivity. In some experiments ethanol of 99.9% purity
around 400 kJ/kgads at a regeneration temperature of 120 °C [37]. has been used with activated carbon (maxsorb-III) [7].

3.1. Work done by using activated carbon and its derivatives – 3.2. Work done by using activated carbon and its derivatives –
Methanol/Ethanol Ammonia

Majority of the work in solar adsorption has been done by using
activated carbon and its derivatives like Maxsorb-III, A-15, A-20 etc
with methanol. Due to the excellent porosity and surface area, the
usage of activated carbon is maximised in this field. The adsorbate
frequently used was methanol in most of the cases. El-
Sharkawyetal. [7] aimed to improve the cooling performance of
the system by using A-20, A-15 and methanol in his system. Sim-
ilar works are done by several authors on different systems
[7,12,14,16,19]. Climatic conditions during the performance in
most of these experiments were almost the same. The solar collec-
tors were placed at an angle between 35 and 45°. The COP is
observed between 0.096 and 0.21 in case of activated carbon and
methanol. Certain systems used ethanol in place of methanol for
the experiments gave a better COP than the previous systems men-
tioned above. A maximum COP of 0.51 was observed by utilising
maxsorb-III and ethanol in the system [18]. The investigator had
used magnetic suspension particle system in which hydrogen trea-
ted adsorbent is used. According to the working pairs used, acti-
vated carbon with ethanol is better than that of methanol, but
there is a little difficulty of using ethanol in the system because
Numerical studies were done on the systems using this working
pair. A higher COP is observed in the experiment of 0.43 [5]. The
system is equipped with PTC (Parabolic Trough Solar Collector).
It is not advisable to use ammonia as adsorbate because it is haz-
ardous to human health. Any leakage of ammonia could poison
the food materials stored, if the system is designed for refrigeration
purpose.
3.3. Work done by using Ammonia-water
Experiments using ammonia-water are comparatively less than
that of activated carbon-methanol pair. As ammonia is a toxic gas,
it is not used frequently in experiments. Citroph etal. [9] used
ammonia-water for a refrigeration process running on diurnal
cycle. This pair is not appreciated due to the toxicity of ammonia.
3.4. Work done by using silica gel-water
This is also a promising pair for the refrigeration purposes. In
case of COP, a good range of 0.2–0.5 has been shown in the exper-

Table 3
Properties of some adsorbent and adsorbate combination.

Adsorbent Adsorbate Maximum adsorption capacity (kg/kg) Adsorption temperature (℃) Pressure (bar) ODP GWP
Activated carbon Methanol 0.259 30 0.0523 0 2.8
Silica gel Water 0.116 30 0.09587 0 NA
Zeolite Water 0.236 30 0.09587 0 NA
Activated carbon Ethanol 1.2 30 0.09675 0 NA

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Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al.
Fig. 7. Comparison of different specific cooling energy for low temperature working pair.
iments [10,11,15]. The regeneration temperature of silica gel is
lower as compared to activated carbon which is an advantage for
the former, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is high
as compared to methanol and ethanol. There is a high advantage
for silica gel-water and activated carbon-methanol pairs over the
others because of the capability to be driven by relative low heat
or by near ambient temperatures so that waste heat below
100 °C could be recovered, which is highly desirable property.
4. New working pairs
4.1. Activated carbon and diethyl ether
Ghouti et al. [38] used activated carbon and diethyl ether as the
working pair. The chemical formula for diethyl ether is (C2H5)2O. In
their experiment, the adsorption bed consists of multi tubular
arrangement in which activated carbon was incorporated in
meshed tubes engulfed by a cylinder. The experiment was con-
ducted at 26 °C, 35 °C, 50 °C of adsorber temperature. It was found
that the time taken to achieve the equilibrium temperature
between the working pairs reduces as the temperature increases.
The best result was obtained at 50 °C of adsorber temperature.
4.2. Activated carbon (Maxsorb-III) and R134a
Shmroukh etal. [29] opted maxsorb-III and R134a for carrying
out the experiment between the temperatures ranging from
20 °C to 60 °C. R134a is the refrigerant generally used in VCRS.
The experiment was observed under different temperature ranges
25, 32, 40, 52 and 60 °C. It was found that 1 kg of maxsorb-III could
adsorb 1.6 kg of R134a and the cycle time for the experiment was
1200 s. Authors also used activated carbon and R134a for the
experiment. The experimental temperature ranges vary from 25
to 50 °C. Result says that the best outcome was observed at 25 °C
that 1 kg of activated carbon could adsorb 0.8352 kg of R134a.
4.3. Activated carbon (Maxsorb-III) and R507A
Shmroukh etal. [29] opted maxsorb-III and R507A for the exper-
iment. Four different temperatures were used for the conduction of
experiment. Out of that, at 20 °C, it was observed that an adsorp-
tion rate of maxsorb-III is as high as 1.3 kg per kg and the cycle
time was 1100 s.
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Materials Today: Proceedings 46 (2021) 5639–5646
4.4. Activated carbon and hydrogen
Huang et al. [34] investigated the performance of hydrogen on
super activated carbon prepared by using potassium hydroxide
under N2 or CO2.The hydrogen capacity of activated carbon was
totally relied on micro pore volume. Usage of this combination
was not appreciated because of the presence of acidic group that
suppresses the storage of hydrogen on activated carbon due to
steric hindrance effect. In order to minimize the effect, a catalyst
can be utilized.
4.5. Activated carbon (Maxsorb-III) and n-butane
Saha et al. [39] used maxsorb-III and n-butane (C4H10) foe the
experiment to find out the adsorption isotherm of the adsorbate
on pitch based adsorbent at different temperatures and pressures
are measured. The adsorption capacity was found out to be
0.8 kg of n-butane per kg of maxsorb-III with an adsorption tem-
perature of 35 °C. The cycle time was noted to be 1400 s.
4.6. Activated carbon and CO2
Shen etal. [40] used activated carbon in beads form with carbon
dioxide as working pair for the experimental study of its adsorp-
tion properties. The equilibrium of adsorption process was noted
at different temperature and pressure ranges. The best result was
0.0844 g of CO2 on 1 g of activated carbon on bead form at
100 kPa and 303 K. The isosteric heat was found out to be
23.17 kJ/mol.
5. Conclusion
Adsorption refrigeration has many advantages over vapour
compression and vapour absorption systems. It can be used for a
wide range of application such as ice making, refrigeration, air con-
ditioning and can also use as a cold storage for preserving food
materials, vaccines etc. Most of the adsorption refrigeration sys-
tems deliver a COP in range between 0.1 and 0.3. Adsorption refrig-
eration system has a COP of 0.48 by using a two-stage adsorption
chiller with zeolite-water as the working pair in combination with
a driving heat source of 55 °C and heat sink temperature at 30 °C. It
is reported from the recent literatures that the COP and SCP of the
adsorption refrigeration systems would increase by the increase of
adsorption and desorption temperature. Nowadays activated car-
Manish Kumar Ojha, Anoop Kumar Shukla, P. Verma et al.
bon is used as adsorbents frequently over other kind of adsorbents
due to its large surface area and high porosity. This distinguishes
activated carbon from other adsorbents such as silica gel, zeolite,
metal chlorides. Activated carbon – methanol is used mainly in
experimental studies because it achieved sub-zero temperature
and hence it is used in freezing applications. In order to achieve
a continuous cooling effect a minimum of two absorbers are
required in the adsorption refrigeration systems.
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Manish Kumar Ojha: Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing
- original draft. Anoop Kumar Shukla: Supervision, Review and
editing. Puneet Verma: Review and editing. Ravindra Kannojiya:
Data curation.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
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