Absorption Refigerator

en.wikipedia.org

4 pointsdragontamer2 comments

I clicked on ~4 links on Wikipedia and ended up with a concept I've never heard of before. The Absorption Refrigerator.

Absorption Refrigerators use heat to directly power their cooling. As you may know, cooling (from air conditioners and/or refrigerators), require power. What's interesting is that a source of heat far above ambient can "power" the cooling cycle, if you line up the fluid-dynamics just right.

Yes, a common example is the small fridges in hotel rooms, usually they are absorption because there are no moving parts (and so it is silent, unlike the compressor driven ones), the technology wqs originally developed by Dometic/Electrolux.

For air conditioning/cooling there are GAHP (gas absorption heat pumps) units that use methane gas as fuel, typically they combine a heating unit and an absorption cooling unit, but there are also chillers only, using "waste" heat or solar here is a simple schematic of how they work:

https://goenergylink.com/blog/how-absorption-chillers-work/

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