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Highlights • New design of a solar refrigerator is proposed. • A good agreement between experiments and simulation was noticed. • Experiments show that the improvements had a good impact on the thermal performance of the solar refrigerator. • The mass of the load inside the storage box has a great influence on the performance of the refrigerator. • The initial mass of refrigerant inside the evaporator is also an important parameter to study. Abstract This work deals with a new design of a solar driven adsorption-refrigerator. The solar refrigerator uses a single bed adsorber-collector and works with silica gel/water as a sorption pair. The novelty of this work is in the use of low cost and effective techniques that permitted to palliate to the problem of days with low solar radiation. In addition to that, a model with a minimum of constraining hypothesis was proposed. The model was implemented in a MATLAB-program and showed a good prediction accuracy during several tests with different operating conditions. This paper aims to put into evidence the impact of an enhancement with four external reflectors. The influence of the mass of the load as well as the influence of the initial mass of the refrigerant are also highlighted. Tests that were effectuated in the region of Sfax-Tunisia, resulted in a maximal COP solar valuing 0.078 and a maximal cooling capacity of 777.96 kJ. The proposed refrigerator was also able to make the temperature of a 9 kg water-load decrease to reach 0 °C during a partially cloudy day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]