TABLE OF CONTENTS "Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it. "
-Salvador Dali
Let's adopt the perspective of the designer or manufacturer of absorption systems. The operating mode can be chiller, heat pump or heat transformer. The device is still at the design and assembly stage - not yet operational. We can modify any or all of the 4 heat reservoirs, as well as the mCE values of the heat exchangers.
For chillers and heat pumps, each possible configuration corresponds to a particular division of total heat rejection between the condenser and the absorber. That is why we have treated this partition as a meaningful control variable. Similarly for heat transformers, the division of the total heat input between the generator and the evaporator is regarded as the corresponding control variable. For all operating modes, one particular value of this control variable will maximize COP. So determining that value is of considerable worth to the designer and manufacturer.
The spirit of our analytic, simplified, approximate modeling schemes is similar to that stated earlier for mechanical chillers. Namely, we are not supplanting massive simulations wherein every property of every component is analyzed in great detail, and every possible chiller performance variable is generated. Rather, we are attempting to capture the key performance features and trends of absorption machines, e.g., the points of maximum COP and maximum useful effect, the variation of COP with useful effect, and how the machine's characteristic performance curve deviates from endoreversible...
