Experimental Study on Heat Transfer Performance of Absorber with Variable Plate Types

An experimental study of the absorption process of water vapor into a lithium bromide solution was performed. For the purpose of developing high performance absorption chiller/hater utilizing lithium bromide solution as working fluid, it is important to improve the performance of absorber with the larger heat transfer area of the four heat exchangers. The experimental apparatus was composed of a plate type absorber which could increase the heat exchange area per unit volume to investigate more detail characteristics instead of the conventional type, that is, horizontal tube bundle type. The size of plate absorbers were made for 0.4m$\times$0.6m and the design objective of a refrigeration capacity was 1RT. In this experiment, three kinds of plate absorbers namely flat plate, dimple plate and groove plate were used. The obtained results were less than the design objective values, that is, the refrigeration capacity was about 0.3 ～0.4RT and the overall heat transfer coefficient was 500～600 kcal/$m^2$h$^{\circ}C$ at the standard conditions.