Energy and Buildings 138 (2017) 271–279 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Energy and Buildings j ourna l ho me page: www.elsevier.com/locate/enbuild Performance assessment and gained operational experiences of a residential scale solar thermal driven adsorption cooling system installed in hot arid area Ahmed Hamza H. Ali Mechanical Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Assiut University, Assiut 71516, Egypt a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 9 July 2016 Received in revised form 3 December 2016 Accepted 20 December 2016 Keywords: Residential solar thermal cooling Ambient effect on performance Solar cooling hot arid area Vacuum tubes field efficiency a b s t r a c t In this study, performance assessment of a residential scale size solar thermal driven adsorption cooling system installed in hot arid and dusty area at Upper Egypt, and, in operation since summer 2012 until now is carried out experimentally for four years in operation, moreover, the gained operational experi- ences are presented. The system performance is expressed in term of the solar collectors’ field thermal efficiency, actual chiller chilling capacity, the temperature of cold-water outlet from the chiller, chiller coefficient of performance (COP) and cooling-water temperature outlet from the cooling tower. The sys- tem performance results show that the daily solar collector efficiency during the reported period was ranged from about 50% to 78%. While, the average chiller COP was varied from 0.4 to 0.64 in combination with average chilling power ranged from 3.6 to 6.42 kW and average chiller outlet cold water temperature ranged from 19 ◦ C to 12.12 ◦ C correspondence to cooling tower outlet cooling water temperature ranged from 31.4 ◦ C to 23.4 ◦ C, respectively. In the cooling session of 2014, a 50 kW cooling capacity wet cooling tower is integrated into the system, and the measurements show that the outlet water temperature from the cooling tower is about 23.4 ◦ C at ambient air dry bulb temperature of 35.7 ◦ C and wet bulb temper- ature of about 19 ◦ C. Consequently, under this new heat rejection condition, the chiller average cooling capacity and COP reaches were 6.42 kW and 0.64 with a chilled water temperature of 15 ◦ C. Clearly from the system operation period, the heat rejection through the re-cooling sub-system has the main signifi- cant impact on the system performance in the hot arid areas. Therefore, it should be based on alternative heat sink recourses with appropriate cost performance techniques. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Energy demand in most of developing nations that located in the hot and arid environments, such as Egypt, is higher than production and represents one of major barriers to further national develop- ment. The building sector is the first electricity consumer in the Arab region (Egypt included) with a share exceeding 57% of the total demand in 2012 as reported by RECREE [1]. Electricity short- age is evident particularly in hot session due to extra power demand required to drive vapor compression air conditioners to cover the needs of buildings cooling load including the residential sector. Enteria and Mizutani [2] reported that conventional air condition- ing systems (A/C) has a large contribution to the buildings energy consumption and represent more than 70% of building energy con- sumption in the Middle East. Nowadays there are many green E-mail addresses: ah-hamza@aun.edu.eg, drahmedhamza@yahoo.com energy technologies in use to drive to air conditioning systems uti- lizes renewable energy resources. Utlization of these technolgies could be one of a proposed solution to reduce the conventional power consumption combined by harmful greenhouse gasses emis- sions. Solar-driven cooling systems are one of these technologies, which gain its importance from being one of a significant applica- tion of solar energy in residential building sector due to the fact of the coincidence of buildings cooling load time distribution with the daily incident solar radiation profile. Egypt is located mostly in Sun Belt zone and classified geographically as a hot, arid area with one of the world highest solar radiation intensity in Upper Egypt. Therefore, most of the residential buildings in Upper Egypt need a mean of thermal comfort cooling for the residence most of the year. Consequently, solar-driven cooling system can be one of the alter- native technology to cover residential buildings cooling demand. Solar-driven or assisted cooling systems are classified either elec- trically driven and/or thermally driven systems. Solar electrically driven systems is using the Photovoltaic (PV) technologies to http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2016.12.062 0378-7788/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.