Lena Schnabel, Carsten Hindenburg, Torsten Geucke
Fraunhofer-Institut fur Solare Energiesysteme ISE, Heidenhofstr. 2, D-79110 Freiburg
email: lena. schnabel@ise. fraunhofer. de, carsten. hindenburg@ise. fraunhofer. de

1. Introduction

In the last seven years intensive research work towards the topic of solar desiccant cooling systems was conducted at Fraunhofer ISE. Due to the low driving temperatures the desiccant cooling technology is promising for cost effective application of solar thermal systems. For office buildings, especially for those with large window areas, there is a high timewise correlation between cooling loads in the building and the available solar irradiation. Therefore a feasibility study on a solar autonomous desiccant cooling system for a seminar room was conducted. Solar autonomous in this context means that the thermal driving energy for the cooling needs is by 100 % provided by the solar system. The promising simulation results led to the installation of a first pilot plant at the building of the chamber of trade and commerce in Freiburg. The plant was commissioned in June 2001. The nominal flow rate of the ventilation system is 10.200 m3/h and the collector array consists of 100 m2 of solar air collectors. The plant serves two rooms in the penthouse floor of the building with conditioned air. The large seminar room has a maximum capacity of 100 persons.

Within the last two years the collected monitoring data were evaluated in detail. In the paper the energy performance of the plant will be discussed. The analysis discusses the room comfort of the two last years, the electricity consumption, the collector and the cooling performance. In general the paper reports on a promising technology for the realisation of solar air conditioning.