More Efficient Solar Powered Air Conditioner Developed in Australia

It will be interesting to see if this leads to practical installations.

http://www.zeitnews.org/natural-sciences/materials-science/more-efficient-solar-powered-air-conditioner-developed-australia

September 4, 2012

The solar powered air conditioner is a holy grail, an answer to so many problems. Perhaps the most attractive solution seemed to be the absorption cooling system, the same kind that is used on propane fridges and has been used in big commercial systems for years. It seemed simple: just put a solar collector on the end instead of the propane or natural gas, but it just never seemed to happen.

That's why I was so excited to see headlines in Physorg like Queensland University of Technology engineer develops electricity-free home cooling system It goes on:

Paolo Corrada, a PhD student in QUT's Faculty of Science and Engineering said the system he has designed cuts energy consumption by 90 per cent.

In fact, Corrada has proposed a solar collector running an ammonia based absorption air conditioning system, but has made it more efficient by using the waste heat (there is a lot of it) to heat domestic hot water, a sort of co-generation system that increases efficiency. He notes in his report that there are some problems:

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This seems to be the crux of the problem; it's complicated. the Broad Corporation in China ran into many of the same issues when trying to build commercial scaled solar powered absorption units. Six years ago I thought they had the next big thing.

As the costs for all the plumbing and storage for the absorption air conditioner go up, the price of photovoltaics keep going down.

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