Modelling of solar-driven cooling system

One of the project important stages is obtaining the environmental data to provide the available daily solar energy (e.g. daily sunshine hours and solar irradiation). The data is essential to model the proposed solar cooling system. In Kigali / Rwanda, the average daily solar radiation is around 5 KWh/m2/day, and the minimum and maximum daily sunshine hours are about 4 and 9 hours, respectively.
We utilise TRNSYS (Transient System Simulation) software to integrate different components of the solar thermal driven adsorption cooling system. Evacuated tube solar collector with a total aperture area of 52 m2 is chosen to provide the heat required to drive the adsorption chiller with a cooling capacity of 4.5 KW. A cold store of 38 m3 is modelled using TRNSYS3D integrated with SketchUp software to provide the actual time dependent cooling load to the system. The weather data for Kigali is directly chosen from TRNSYS database to use with all relevant components. The main challenge is that there are certain days throughout the year where solar energy is insufficient to drive the chiller.