Trial results of domestic CHP & thermally driven cooling technologies use in an office application

Taking into consideration residential and office building application, the cogeneration deployment is economically, energetically and environmentally affected by the opportunity to recover waste heat energy during summer season with its development into trigeneration. The availability of small Thermally Driven Cooling (TDC) systems with cooling capacities of 30 kW down to a few kW and the increasing demand of cooling energy generally satisfied by electrically-driven units (PolySMART The market potential of micro-CHCP - Tecnical report, 2008) have been the driving forces to an increasing interest for microtrigeneration systems fuelled by natural gas, especially in the South of Europe. In this paper, a promising application of polygeneration referred to a mild climatic conditions, such those existing in South Italy, is reported. At the Built Environment Control Laboratory of Seconda Università di Napoli, a system based on gas fuelled internal combustion engine coupled with an Air Cooled Water Chiller, (ACWC) and a Thermochemical absorption system (TCA) has been set-up in order to investigate the on-site performances of micropolygeneration under real operating conditions in an office; this paper deals with the description of experimental set-up and the results of first trials. The investigation is performed by the Energetic, Economic and Environmental approach (3-E analysis), by which the performances of system proposed (i.e. the Alternative System) have been compared to those of conventional energy system.