This paper presents numerical simulation of a silica gel/water adsorption refrigeration system. The
commercial COMSOL Multiphasics® code is used for simulation which employs the finite
element multi-dimensional model for heat and mass transfer processes. The simulation has been
carried out for rectangular tube adsorber. The proposed model is validated against available
experimental data in the literature. The effects of cycle time, heating temperature, cooling
temperature, contact coefficient of heat transfer between grains and heat exchange's surface,
evaporator temperature, grain size and adsorbing/desorbing bed layer thickness on the system
performance were investigated. The results show that both3-D and 2-D modeling for section of the
bed lead to predicting the performance of the entire bed with a good accuracy. One of the main
results of this study is that the layer thickness which gives optimal coefficient of performance
(COP) doesn't depend on grain size. Moreover the results show that both of COP and specific
cooling power (SCP) increase by decreasing grain size.