Power Partners, Inc. has revealed that it is teaming up with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Arkema Inc. on a $2.54 million research programme to improve the efficiency and test new refrigerants in a type of air conditioning unit that runs on waste heat or heat from solar thermal collectors.

The funding was announced mid-July by DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, otherwise known as ARPA-E, and is part of the agency’s Building Energy Efficiency through Innovative Thermodevices, or BEET-IT programme.

Power Partners is a US manufacturer and marketer of energy-efficient, environmentally friendly ECO-MAX adsorption chillers. The adsorption chiller is a type of air conditioner that is powered by waste heat or by heat from solar collectors. It has few moving parts and uses almost no electricity to operate.

During the three-year programme, the team will design, assemble and test an adsorption chiller that takes advantage of PNNL’s metal-organic heat carrier technology and new types of refrigerants. The goal is to utilize PNNL’s advanced materials and develop adsorption chillers that are smaller, more efficient and affordable enough to be used more frequently in commercial buildings.

Opportunity for energy saving

“More efficient methods of cooling represent a great opportunity to reduce energy consumption in buildings, and in doing so, greenhouse gas emissions as well,” said PNNL Laboratory Fellow Pete McGrail, who is leading the research project. “The ARPA-E program represents a unique opportunity to move a recent laboratory discovery to the mainstream HVAC and commercial buildings marketplace in just a few years,” he said.

“Buildings account for 40% of energy use in the United States,” said Mike Stonecipher, Business Segment Leader at Power Partners. “Cooling is one of the primary uses of energy in buildings, yet the basic approaches for cooling have not changed in decades. We are excited about this joint effort to develop a commercially viable product that can meet the demand for energy conservation.”

Power Partners will lead engineering and testing efforts as the project advances from a bench-scale prototype to a 5-ton cooling capacity demonstration unit, utilizing its state-of-the-art test facility. Adsorption chiller technology is attractive to retail stores, hospitals, universities, office complexes, data centers, trigeneration facilities, processing plants, manufacturing plants and government facilities because it saves energy.

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