Abstract
This letter proposes and presents a thermodynamic formulation to calculate the energetic performances of an adsorption cooler as a function of pore widths and volumes of solid adsorbents. The simulated results in terms of the coefficient of performance are validated with experimental data. It is found from the present analysis that the performance of an adsorption cooling device is influenced mainly by the physical characteristics of solid adsorbents, and the characteristics energy between the adsorbent-adsorbate systems. The present study confirms that there exists a special type of silica gel having optimal physical characteristics that allows us to obtain the best performance. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3592260]