Development goal:

The development goal of the project is a cold storage system for use in solar-powered off-grid cooling applications. The target market is seen in rural regions of developing and newly industrialising countries where food production meets a poorly developed regional energy infrastructure.

The primary task is to develop an inexpensive, indirectly cooled cold storage system that can be used variably by cascading similar modules and that can operate with a minimum of coolant fluid. The cold storage to be developed should be able to be installed, maintained and recycled without any advanced knowledge of refrigeration technology. In order to be able to map the required properties of the cold storage module, the storage should be connected to a control unit, which ensures the desired cascading, and an air cooler.

An unconventional approach for the storage elements is the use of PET bottles for encapsulation. This is intended to minimise costs, use locally available resources and contribute to recycling.

Another project objective is the development of a software solution for the configuration of storage systems in connection with the design of complete systems for solar cooling. The aim is to develop a two-stage software that enables a quick assessment for users and a detailed design for manufacturers and suppliers. As part of the project, the functionality of the design is to be created as a calculation core in an API and a test application for functional testing as a simple web application (WebApp).

An overall system is to be set up for testing and optimisation. An existing test rig will be modified for this purpose and the modular cold accumulators will be integrated.