  The building climate industry and its influence on energy consumption have
consequences on the environment due to the emission of greenhouse gasses.
Improving the efficiency of this sector is essential to reduce the effect on
climate change. In recent years, the interest in porous materials in
applications such as heat pumps has increased for their promising potential. To
assess the performance of adsorption heat pumps and cooling systems, here we
discuss a multistep approach based on the processing of adsorption data
combined with a thermodynamic model. The process provides properties of
interest, such as the coefficient of performance, the working capacity, the
specific heat or cooling effect, or the released heat upon adsorption and
desorption cycles, and it also has the advantage of identifying the optimal
conditions for each adsorbent-fluid pair. To test this method, we select
several metal-organic frameworks that differ in topology, chemical composition,
and pore size, which we validate with available experiments. Adsorption
equilibrium curves were calculated using molecular simulations to describe the
adsorption mechanisms of methanol and ethanol as working fluids in the selected
adsorbents. Then, using a thermodynamic model we calculate the energetic
properties combined with iterative algorithms that simultaneously vary all the
required working conditions. We discuss the strong influence of operating
temperatures on the performance of heat pump devices. Our findings point to the
highly hydrophobic metal azolate framework MAF-6 as a very good candidate for
heating and cooling applications for its high working capacity and excellent
energy efficiency.
