Experiences with solar cooling systems in Kuwait

Solar space cooling is important in the countries of the Arabian Peninsula where nearly half of the total produced electricity is used for air conditioning of residential commercial and public buildings. In Kuwait, large proportion of funds were allocated for research in solar cooling applications. By the year 1985, several small and medium capacity demonstration projects were installed and tested and more were anticipated for the future. These systems used flat plate collectors and small vapor absorption refrigeration (VAR) system of 5 to 10 tons cooling capacity (TR). The first large installation in Kuwait was carried out in the early eighties for a school building. Immediately thereafter, an equally important installation comprising of 300 m2 of flat plate collector area and three 10 TR VAR chillers, was completed in 1983 for an office building of the Ministry of Defense (MOD). These two well instrumented installations were tested for more than one summer season. The system at MOD is the most successful installation and it has been functioning excellently, to-date. Performance results of the system taken during the summer of 1995 have been presented in this paper.