oa Solar Thermal System for Heating and Cooling Requirements of Commercial Building in Doha: A Case Study

The demand for cooling in Gulf region is the direct effect of its high atmospheric temperature. Around 60% of the electricity demand in GCC is for cooling purpose. The main source of cooling and air-conditioning in these countries are conventional electric compression cycle, which leads to the increase in the GHG emission, directly in the form of leaked gases from these systems and indirectly in the form of fossil fuel used for the production of the used electricity for these systems. Solar energy in general and solar thermal energy specifically can be a promising and sustainable solution to the cooling and air-conditioning requirement for the buildings in Qatar and GCC. Absorption cooling and air-conditioning is a mature and promising technology with respect to its efficiency and results on the industrial scale. However, the use of technology with solar thermal energy is new in the market. In this paper, the feasibility analysis of solar thermal technology has been done for the cooling, heating and hot water requirement of a commercial building in Doha, Qatar. Heating and hot water requirement for winter and cooling requirement for summer season were calculated and used as a load. Solar thermal collectors (STC) were used as the main source of thermal energy collection form sunlight. Along with STC, thermally driven adsorption chiller was designed to fulfill the cooling requirement in the summer season. The design and selection of the different components and parameters such as Solar thermal collector area, storage tank size, adsorption chiller etc. have been done in detail. The result, obtained for building's energy demand and its supply from the designed solar thermal system, gives a clear sign for the successful implementation of this technology.