Measurement of ammonia absorption in new absorbent - Preliminary results

In absorption refrigeration system, absorber is considered as the most critical component, both in terms of influence on system performance and cost. Research and investigations related to the absorption characteristics have been carried out extensively, particularly in the interest of heat and mass transfer phenomena in order to improve the performance of the absorber and to reduce its size. However, information related to the absorption characteristics in the absorber with new working fluid pairs remains limited. In this paper, ammonia-ionic liquids are proposed as a novel working pairs for absorption refrigeration systems. The main objective of this paper is to develop a measurement setup to study the absorption capacity of the ammonia vapor in various ionic liquids in a pool type absorber. This investigation is necessary to find the most suitable ionic liquid as an absorbent for ammonia (refrigerant). Furthermore, it is also important to find the most suitable absorber configuration for the proposed ammonia/ionic liquid absorption systems. The selection of absorber type for ionic liquids as absorbents in the initial studies plays an important role as they are quite viscous. The details of the methodology and experimental setup of the measurement are explained in this paper as well as preliminary results of absorption capacity using ammonia/polyethylene glycol mixture.