Three absorption facilities are planned during this program to study small (less than 10kW) and large (more than 30kW) installations:

• Small installations will be tested on the LATEP and the SOLERA facilities.

• Large installation will be studied thanks to the RAFSOL installation worked out by the LPBS.

The LATEP project installation is a 4.5 kW Rotartica machine with a drycooler, a cold and a hot storage as shown on the following layout.

The SOLERA project is a European project started in November 2007, for 4 years. The sub-group 2 “small scale solar air conditioning in southern France”, is composed of French companies. The demonstration installation will be built in the new building of CEA-INES at Chambery, France. The chiller will be the one produced by Rotartica, with a nominal cooling capacity of 4.5 kW. The solar collector will be flat plate collectors and the terminal units will be high energy efficiency console units. The re-cooling system will be a geothermal heat exchanger able to dissipate 15 kW for a inlet temperature of 25 °C. The flat plate collectors will be located on the roof of the Puma III building (Figure ) and the system will be use to cool a modular area of offices located at the first floor

The main interest of the RAFSOL project is to propose a specific study of the absorption solar cooling processes in tropical climate. Moreover, this facility, designed to cool four classrooms of a university building operates without any backup system. The main components of the installation are proposed on the following figure:

1: absorption chiller (cooling capacity = 30 kW), 2: 36 solar collectors (total area = 90m2),

3: cooling tower (cooling capacity = 80 kW),

4: hot (V=1500L) and cold (V=1000L) storage, 5: cooling coils providing cooling in classrooms.