LAUSR

Abstract Refrigeration is generally recognised as a key tool for successful marketing of fresh produce. However, such sophisticated cooling systems are unavailable or non-existent for African smallholder farmers due to financial constraints and lack of electricity supply. The application of low cost silica gel-water adsorption based cooling systems has attracted attention for on-farm storage. However, the drawback till now was low cooling performance. Therefore, this work focused on evaluating the cooling performance of adsorption based cooling refrigerator (prototype) at different cooling cycle times of 30, 60, 90 and 120 min with regeneration cycles fixed to 30 min and various hot water regeneration temperatures of 60, 70 and 80 °C. The study reveals that the cooling cycle time influences the reduction in storage temperature most, while both increasing hot water temperature and cooling cycle time enhance the cooling capacity of the prototype. Additionally, the adsorption based cooling system prototype was examined on its capability of storing fresh mangoes which resulted in 3% mass loss of fruits at average inside air temperature of 15 °C and relative humidity of 90%. These results suggest that the new energy saving storage technology, can be adopted for storage of fresh commodities in Sub-Saharan African countries.