raw · papers · ingested 2026-06-27
Improving ice productivity for an activated-carbon/methanol solar adsorption ice-maker
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0038092X13004301
Source: Solar Energy, 2013 (abstract/index; full text 403). Corroborating: AIP Advances 10:105315 (2020). Credibility: High (peer-reviewed). Confidence: medium-high (snippet-level numbers).
Key points
- For the direct, once-daily, granular-bed AC/methanol ice-maker: “Enhancement of heat and mass transfer in the adsorption bed is the most effective method to increase system performance.”
- Recent design focus is the bed internals (conductivity, contact, vapor paths), not the optical/absorber face.
- Class performance: ~4-7 kg ice/m²/day, solar COP ~0.10-0.15.
- AIP Advances 2020: adsorbent bed heat transfer is “very poor” (low intrinsic conductivity); desorption is endothermic and heat-into-bed limited; “porous material with good adsorption usually exhibits poor conductivity.”
Relevance
The pivotal evidence for geometric-blackness-solar-adsorption-bed-face: the binding constraint is intra-bed transport, not solar capture — so raising absorber-face capture (geometric blackness) hits diminishing returns. This is the same transport-limit the fractal-hierarchical-bed-geometry thesis established, now confirmed for the direct-solar case.