Novel exploitation of Dubinin-Astakhov theory in sorption reactor design for refrigeration and heat pumps applications

This paper describes novel methodology that is based on a single given adsorbent-refrigerant pair characteristic (example activated carbon 208C–Ammonia pair) leading to the characterization of the same adsorbent (activated carbon 208C) with various refrigerants such as Methanol, Ethanol, R723 (azeotropic mixture of 60% Ammonia and 40% Dimethyl Ether) and R744 (Carbon Dioxide). Overall, with exception of R744 (Carbon Dioxide), the results obtained shows a marginal difference compared to standard method that heavily depends on experimental data. For example with methanol, the standard method produces a maximum uptake (xo) of 0.3676 kg methanol/kg carbon while the new method predicts 0.3740 kg methanol/kg carbon; with CO2 both standard and new methods predict 0.3242 kg CO2/kg carbon and 0.3850 kg CO2/kg carbon