Thermally Driven Cooling: Technologies, Developments and Applications

In the present paper we present the different thermally driven cooling technologies. We give an overview of the technologies, the state of the art for each technology and present research topics as well as typical performance data. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of each technology and present different applications. We analyze essential constraints of the systems in order to roughly estimate the suitability of a particular application in terms of energetic performance, primary energy demand and economic potential. In order to illustrate the potential of small scale units we present some operation results of a 5.5kW solar driven system installed at the Fraunhofer-Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg, Germany.