Comparison between cold and hot network in a solar district cooling system

Heat-powered absorption cooling have attracted attention in recent decades, especially in regions with hot and arid climates a higher availability of solar radiation, can be exploited in solar-assisted District Cooling (SDC) system to reduce costs. The paper proposes a comparison of two Solar District Cooling configurations powered by a PTC field with thermal storage and an absorption chiller. The first configuration, called cold network, has a large hot water storage tank slaved to a single chiller that produces all the chilled water that is distributed to the network; in the second configuration, called hot network, the water heated in the solar array is sent through the network directly to thermal storage tanks, located near the buildings to be served, where each agglomeration has its own chillers. A techno-economic optimization was performed for the two configurations by varying the Solar Fraction (SF), from 25% to 100%. When solar radiation is not sufficient to meet demand, an aux...