Numerical Investigation of Copper Foam Adsorption Beds Packed With MOF801 for Space Cooling and Desalination Applications

In this paper, an emerging Metal Organic Framework adsorbent MOF-801 packed into a recently developed copper foamed adsorbent-bed is numerically investigated under different operating conditions and physical parameters and benchmarked against the widely used silica gel adsorbent. A numerical model using lumped dynamic modelling approach was developed and validated against experimental data. The results demonstrated an improvement in the overall performance of both MOF-801 and silica gel foam packed beds due to the enhancement in the effective thermal conductivity. The MOF-801-based system showed a higher performance for desalination applications with a maximum specific daily water production of 13 m³/ton·day compared to 9.2 m³/ton·day for the silica gelbased system. MOF-801-based system evidenced its competition in the cooling applications, achieving enhancement for the specific cooling power with average 40% higher than the silica gel-based system.