The demand for cooling devices has increased during the last years and this trend will continue. Adsorption-driven chillers (ADCs) using water as the working fluid and low temperature waste energy for regeneration are an environmentally friendly alternative to currently employed cooling devices and can concurrently help to dramatically decrease energy consumption. Due to the ideal water sorption behavior and proven lifetime stability of [Al(OH)(m-BDC)] ∙ x H O (m-BDC = 1,3-benzenedicarboxylate), also denoted CAU-10-H, a green very robust synthesis process under reflux, with high yields up to 95% is developed and scaled up to 12 kg-scale. Shaping of the adsorbent is demonstrated, which is important for an application. Thus monoliths and coatings of CAU-10-H are produced using a water-based binder. The composites are thoroughly characterized toward their mechanical stability and water sorption behavior. Finally a full-scale heat exchanger is coated and tested under ADC working conditions. Fast adsorption dynamic leads to a high power output and a good power density. A low regeneration temperature of only 70 °C is demonstrated, allowing the use of low temperature sources like waste heat and solar thermal collectors.

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Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) currently receive high interest for cycling water adsorption applications like adsorption heat transformation for air-conditioning purposes. For practical use in adsorption heat pumps (AHPs), the microcrystalline powders must be formulated such that their high porosity and pore accessibility are retained. In this work, the preparation of millimeter-scaled pellets of MIL-160­(Al), Al-fumarate (Basolite A520), UiO-66­(Zr), and Zr-fumarate (MOF-801) is reported by applying the freeze granulation method. The use of poly­(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) as a binder reproducibly resulted in highly stable, uniformly shaped PVA/MOF pellets with 80 wt % MOF loading, with essentially unchanged MOF porosity properties after shaping. The shaped pellets were analyzed for the application in AHPs by water adsorption isotherms, over 1000 water adsorption/desorption cycles, and thermal and mechanical stability tests. Furthermore, the Al-fum pellets were applied in a fixed-bed, full-scale heat exchanger, yielding specific cooling powers from 349 up to 431 W/kg (adsorbent), which outperforms the current commercially used silica gel grains in AHPs under comparable operating conditions.