Prediction of practically chargeable cold energy in an ice storage system

빙축열시스템의 실질적인 최대 축열 가능량 예측

The charge operation of an ice storage system has been analyzed in this paper. The thermal characteristics of major components of the ice storage system. i.e., the refrigerator and the ice storage tank are evaluated from performance tests on an existing ice storage system. Based on the measured data for thermal characteristics, a simulation is carried out for the charge operation and the effect of the refrigerator size on the system performance is investigated. The results indicate that the larger the refrigerator size for a given storage capacity, the lower the inlet temperature of the ice storage tank so that the lower the efficiency of charge operation. It is also found that there exists an optimal size of the refrigerator with which the ice storage at the end of the charge operation is maximized, but the complete charge is not possible even with the optimally sized refrigerator. This leads to the result that the design capacity of the storage tank should be larger than the required amount of cold energy for the daytime cooling considering the practically chargeable amount of cold energy during the nighttime. Where the cooling load sharing of the storage is 40%, the nominal capacity of an ice storage tank needs to be larger than the required storage amount by 30%.