Cooling of electronic equipments has become an important issue as the advances in technology enabled the fabrication of very small devices. The main challenge in cooling is the space limitation. The use of miniature refrigerators seems to be a solution alternative for the cooling problem. The objective of this study is to design and simulate a vapor compression refrigeration cycle for a micro-scale refrigerator. A MATLAB code is developed for the simulations. The four components of the refrigerator, namely, the condenser, evaporator, compressor and the capillary tube are designed separately. The cycle is successfully completed nearly at the same point where it begins. The cold space temperature, ambient air temperature, condensation and evaporation temperatures, and the evaporator heat load are the predetermined parameters. A fan is used to cool the condenser, and the compressor is selected as isentropic. R-134A is selected as the refrigerant and a simple interpolation code is developed to obtain the thermophysical properties of R-134A. The original design is carried out with an isentropic compressor. For the purpose of comparison, a cycle with a polytropic compressor is also considered. Similarly, two alternative designs for the evaporator are developed and simulated. A second law analysis is performed at the end of the study.

In this thesis, performance of a heat pump aided by solar heating system with an evacuated tubular collector has been analyzed theoretically and experimentally. For this purpose, a domestic hot water heating system has been designed, constructed and tested. The evacuated tubular solar collector has been used to achieve higher collector efficiency in winter. The fraction of the solar energy utilized has been measured experimentally and estimated theoretically. Effects of various parameters have been investigated on the performance of the proposed system. A mathematical model was developed to investigate the effects of different environmental, design and operational parameters on the solar heating system. In order to compare the obtained theoretical results with experimental ones, an experimental study has been carried out. For that, a number of experiments have been made at the solar house of the Mechanical Engineering Department of METU. An air-to-air heat pump was integrated with an evacuated tubular solar water heater unit (closed water circulation) and the performance of it has been studied experimentally. As a result of the experimental study, the maximum value of the coefficient of performance of the solar assisted heat pump used in this study was obtained as 4.85. The second law efficiency of the system was between 4.8-27.4 %.