Abstract

Industrial refrigeration underpins critical processes in the pharmaceutical sector and contributes significantly to energy consumption and emissions. Solar thermal cooling emerges as a promising alternative by harnessing concentrated solar irradiation to drive absorption chillers without fossil fuels. Absorption systems in pharmaceutical facilities typically rely on liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) to achieve low‑temperature demands (-10 °C), resulting in high operational costs and carbon footprints. Here we address the feasibility of integrating medium‑temperature parabolic trough collectors (PTCs) with and without thermal energy storage (TES) to meet a 118.2 kW cooling load in a Toluca, México, pharmaceutical plant. We applied a validated thermohydraulic model to size a 900 m² PTC array (no TES) and a 1350 m² array with 28.16 m³ TES, simulating design‑day and annual performance under realistic irradiance and load profiles. Here we show that the PTC–TES configuration achieves daily LPG savings up to 500 kg (≈USD 300), attains solar coefficients of performance of 0.2407 (no TES) and 0.2219 (with TES), and increases the annual solar fraction from 40.7 % to 61.0 %. These results exceed prior solar cooling applications in food and mining by demonstrating rooftop PTC viability under area constraints and quantifying exergy benefits in a pharmaceutical context. Our findings advance the integration of renewable heat in industrial cooling, offering a replicable framework to decarbonize energy‑intensive processes and support global climate targets.