Solar energy is the most sustainable and free source to manage the world energy demand. One aspect of solar-driven energy supply can be observed in cooling systems. Recently, solar energy-based cooling systems have received many attentions. Solar cooling systems utilizing solar collectors, as the renewable and sustainable-based solution, have the good potentials to overcome the challenges associated with consumption of fossil fuels. In this study, the recent advances about the potentials of dish collectors and linear Fresnel reflectors for the usage in the cooling systems are reviewed. In addition, the solar-powered conventional absorption chiller and cryogenic systems are investigated. Hybrid cooling solar systems and solar-based combined cooling, heating, and power systems are also studied. The hydrogen production in cooling integrated systems and cold thermal energy storage are discussed. In each section, in addition to general description of the system, some explanations about the thermodynamic and economic aspects of the systems are provided. Finally, the main results of the review are summarized and based on the available gaps between the literatures, some suggestions are provided for the future studies. It was found that using solar dish collectors in a hybrid system, designed for the freshwater and LNG production, causes carbon dioxide emissions reduction by 40%, and also increases freshwater and LNG production by 95% and 4.7%, respectively. In the hybrid trigeneration solar-biomass power plants, using the linear Fresnel reflector leads to 29% save in biomass and land.
Keywords: Absorption chiller; Cryogenic; Hydrogen production; Linear Fresnel collector; Solar dish collector.
© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.