Solar and thermal climatisation of buildings

The increasing demands for the maintenance of a comfortable indoor temperature and the increasing demand for cold in the industry resulted in a globally, highly increasing number of technical systems for indoor air conditioning and cold production. Most of the systems (annually worldwide 100 millions of new stationary and 35 millions of mobile systems) are current-operated compression cold production systems.

This means that during the summer months, when the solar radiation volume is at its peak, the demand for electricity is strongly increasing. Furthermore, due to the conditions of use for the buildings, there is a demand for indoor air conditioning during the period of high solar radiation. This shows that when using solar radiation for cooling purposes mostly there is no need for large energy stores.

Processes, which use environmental energy or even waste heat, can make a material contribution to solving this problem of growing demand for electricity. By this new method, refrigerants, which for the most part are polluting, can be substituted and a further steps can be taken towards reduction of the worldwide increase of CO2 and thus the fulfilment of the Kyoto Protocol.