Impact of instantaneous solar irradiance on refrigeration characteristics of household PCM storage air conditioning directly driven by distributed photovoltaic energy

Abstract Mature and inexpensive ice thermal storage was employed to replace battery bank in energy storage, and photovoltaic directly driven technology was also combined in this paper. A 3HP household air conditioning assisted with ice thermal storage was investigated in four operating conditions. First, directly driven by photovoltaic arrays, the (COP)rs were almost 6.31% than that of refrigerator driven by power grid for the instantaneous solar irradiance, and the stored cooling capacity decreased 18.63% under the intermittent influence of solar irradiance. Moreover, the (COP)r of refrigerator operating in out‐of‐box mode was about 1.38 times that of operating in ice storage mode. Next, the inevitable compress motor fluctuation, caused by instantaneous solar irradiance, was investigated by experiment and simulation. In three typical weathers, compressor fluctuating time was approximately 65.22 s, 197.05 s, and 270.48 s in full irradiance range. When the lower solar irradiance limit was optimized from 150 to 80 Wm−2, refrigerator operated stably and continuously in any weather conditions. The ice production and the (COP)r were improved by 40.91% and 12.36%, respectively.