Solar air conditioning for office and server rooms

The present paper deals with the potentials of using solar thermal driven systems for air conditioning of office buildings and central server rooms. For this, a systems model consisting of a building according to passive house standard, a server room and a solar air conditioning system using absorption chillers was developed for TRNSYS and evaluated regarding its thermal behaviour. Hereby, the energy demand of the buildings as well as the server room was determined. The investigations showed that for such a building, an active cooling system can increase the comfort in the office rooms significantly, even for mild climates. It has been proven that using solar air conditioning systems in combination with free cooling for server cooling is a promising concept and can lead to significant reductions of primary energy consumptions. However, special measures have to be addressed to increase the solar fraction of the system up to suitable levels.