Performance assessment of some ice TES systems

In this paper, a performance assessment of four main types of ice storage techniques for space cooling purposes, namely ice slurry systems, ice-on-coil systems (both internal and external melt), and encapsulated ice systems is conducted. A detailed analysis, coupled with a case study based on the literature data, follows. The ice making techniques are compared on the basis of energy and exergy performance criteria including charging, discharging and storage efficiencies, which make up the ice storage and retrieval process. Losses due to heat leakage and irreversibilities from entropy generation are included. A vapor-compression refrigeration cycle with R134a as the working fluid provides the cooling load, while the analysis is performed in both a full storage and partial storage process, with comparisons between these two. In the case of full storage, the energy efficiencies associated with the charging and discharging processes are well over 98% in all cases, while the exergy efficiencies ranged from 46% to 76% for the charging cycle and 18% to 24% for the discharging cycle. For the partial storage systems, all energy and exergy efficiencies were slightly less than that for full storage, due to the increasing effect wall heat leakage has on the decreased storage volume and load. The results show that energy analyses alone do not provide much useful insight into system behavior, since the vast majority of losses in all processes are a result of entropy generation which results from system irreversibilities.