Impacts of the internal heat recovery scheme on the performance of an adsorption heat transformer cycle for temperature upgrade

Adsorption heat transformer (AHT) cycles, unlike adsorption cooling cycles, upgrade the heat source to a higher temperature. Despite the renewed interest in the AHT cycles, its performance enhancement schemes along with their impacts are yet to be explored extensively. Heat and mass recovery schemes on the adsorption cooling/heating cycles have been extensively studied. However, AHT cycles are fundamentally different from those cycles since the AHT cycles employ isothermal-adiabtic processes. Thus, similar impacts of the heat and mass recovery scheme as in the cooling/heating cycles cannot be expected in AHT cycles. Therefore, the impacts and limitations of the internal heat recovery scheme on the AHT cycle are investigated in the current study. The heat recovery scheme aims to minimize the requisite uptake consumption for preheating the adsorber bed by recovering the sensible heat between two adsorber beds having different temperatures. This sensible heat exchange is modeled using modified energy-balance equations to capture the non-linearity of the adsorption process. The preheating uptake loss decreases from 0.014 kg/kg to 0.007 kg/kg at the heat source-heat supply temperature combination of 60 °C–80 °C due to the maximum possible heat recovery in the AHT cycle. As a result of the reduced preheating uptake loss, approximately 5% and 10% increase in the useful heat ratio and exergy efficiency of the AHT cycle, respectively are obtained. This modified AHT cycle further improves the performance ratio of the hybrid AHT-MED (multi-effect distillation) system from 4.6 to 4.9 at the heat source temperature of 58 °C. Furthermore, a parametric analysis of the cycle's performance metrics has been conducted for various degrees of heat recovery, representing the effect of realistic heat exchanger effectiveness during the recovery process. This study will help propel the theoretical development of the adsorption-based thermodynamic systems.