STUDY OF A PACKAGED SOLAR ICE MAKER

A solar ice maker with a 0.8 m2 collection surface was studied with a view to building an industrial machine. It is an adsorption machine with an intermittent daily cycle that uses the active carbon Ac 35-methanol pair. It is very simple in that the same exchanger can be used either as an evaporator or as a condenser. The system management consists simply of moving this exchanger between the thermally insulated ice bank and an ambient-temperature water tank, and in actuating the ventilation ports for the heating and cooling of the collector. No valve is required. The results show that, with a collection efficiency of 0.41 and a thermal COP of 0.40, it is possible to obtain a gross solar COP of 0.15 (as a function of the quantity of methanol). Because of insufficient insulation of the ice bank, the net COP obtained was twice as low. This machine produced 4 kg of ice per day, during summer, which corresponds to a daily output (non-optimized) of 5 kg of ice per square metre of collection surface.