Mobile Heat Actuated Air Conditioning and Heating Unit

As DoD develops more complex weapons, electronics and computer platforms there is an increasing demand for both power and cooling. This highlights the urgent need for innovative designs in environmental control and electric generation. Electric generation releases waste heat. Heat-activated absorption cycles can convert exhaust heat to useful cooling. This ability gains added significance in mobile applications, in view of all the system level costs of generating motive power for electric powered chillers. This proposal focuses on the DoD requirements for mobile air conditioning, but with a clear vision of the importance to many private sector applications, such as bus air conditioning, refrigerated trucks, and refrigerated boats and ships. This Phase I effort will provide a preliminary design of a 1.5 ton environmental control unit (ECU) which can be powered by field generator exhaust. The focus is on achieving the high level of compactness and light weight appropriate for a mobile application. One critical component ?the absorber/AHX ?will be actually fabricated and tested. This work is in preparation for prototyping and testing the complete ECU in phase II. This project will demonstrate the compactness and economy achievable from a modest extrapolation from the current state-of-the-art in aqua ammonia absorption cycles.