Comparison between different solar cooling thermally driven system solutions for an office building in Mediterranean Area

The amount of energy for air conditioning in the summer time in Mediterranean Area is very high because of hot weather and high temperature values. Solar cooling technology is interesting because strong sunlight covers the cooling requirement. The heat energy from the sun it is available when the demand of electricity has high peaks for the strong use for air conditioning devices. In this work, an analysis by means of NEGST software (New Generation of Solar Thermal System) on a solar cooling and heating system located in the southern part of Italy has been carried out. The building is a Quality Assurance Office of a chemical industry. It is 48 m long, 23 m wide and 3.5 m high, and about 200 people work inside. Thermal loads from people, PC, machines etc. have been estimated by means of Energy Plus code. Three different type of collectors (FPC, ETC and PTC) and two different chillers have been considered: single effect for collectors FPC and ETC and double effect (H2O-BrLi) for the collectors PTC. Results in terms of solar fraction and PE-Saving for three different configurations are shown. Besides, the payback period for the best configuration is estimated.