Adsorption energy system design and material selection: Towards a holistic approach

The deployment of adsorption cycles for heating and cooling purposes is often limited by poor efficiency and high reactor volumes, both determined by the adsorber material used. The appropriate pre-selection of the solid sorbent and the system design in the early stages of design can allow quick identification of the most promising solutions. In this work, a reliable and robust methodology for adsorber material screening and pre-selection is proposed and applied to a test set of state-of-the-art candidates. The improvement achieved in the adsorption equilibrium prediction with respect to the most frequently used model is above 60%. In addition, the adsorber material selection framework based on mixed-integer linear programming was applied to over 600 hypothetical cooling and mixed cooling/heating use cases. The analysis of exergy and volume performances allowed to emphasize differences of design strategies using different system objectives (i.e. minimizing the temperature of the heat sources and choosing compact materials). We provide the proof of feasibility of a harmonic pre-design of adsorbent materials and energy system and show that it can be used to narrow down the decision variables to the most promising options. This methodology can be considered as the foundation of more extended and automated design methods for real scenarios constrained by kinetics, material integration and costs.