The Impact of Hot and Cold Storages on a Solar Absorption Cooling System for an Office Building

Buildings consume 40% of the total energy in the U.S. and a half of them are used for heating, cooling and hot water usage. Nowadays, people are paying more attention to the energy efficiency and carbon footprints of buildings. Renewable energy-based solar cooling system is regarded as a good candidate, to reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This paper has explored the impact of thermal storage on the energy performance of the solar absorption cooling system for a benchmark medium-sized office building located in Los Angeles, California. The solar cooling system was designed to provide 50% of the total building cooling by 200m 2 solar collector area. The system selected an absorption chiller at 120kW working with both a hot tank in the solar collection loop and cold storage tanks in the load loop. The sensitivity analyses on the two storages were conducted by varying the volume of the two storages, solar collector area and the nominal capacity of the chiller. The hot storage tank volume was set to 0.01m 3 /m 2 of solar collector area to test the performance of the cold storage with various volumes; and the cold storage tank volume was set to 4m 3 to test the performance of the hot storage with various volumes. The results indicated that a reasonable sized cold storage tank could reduce the chiller's capacity, but it does not significantly affect the system's energy performance. When the cold storage tank volume varies between 4m