Exergoeconomic and environmental analyses of an air conditioning system using thermal energy storage

In this work, a combination of a latent heat thermal storage unit and a refrigeration system is presented as an air conditioning system. Overall system, including charging and discharging processes is analyzed for different phase change materials (PCMs) from exergoeconomic and environmental points of view. Based on comfort condition, three cases are selected with different size of PCM slabs and different PCMs: RT27, S27 and SP25. When the charging process takes place during the whole of off-peak hours the following results are obtained: (1) the system using SP25 has the highest value of the coefficient of performance; (2) the system using RT27 has the highest value of exergy efficiency and (3) the system using S27 has the lowest value of total cost rate. Finally, in order to obtain the best balance between the exergy destruction cost rate and the capital cost rate, the exergoeconomic factor is defined for each component, for different cases when system operates in the best performance conditions. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.