A novel silica gel-water adsorption chiller with two chambers has been built in Shanghai Jiao Tong University.(SJTU). This chiller combines two single bed systems (basic system) without any vacuum valves. One adsorber, one condenser and one evaporator are housed in the same chamber to constitute one adsorption/desorption unit. In this work, the chiller is developed and improved. The improved chiller is composed of three vacuum chambers: two adsorption/desorption vacuum chambers; (the same structure as the former chiller) and one heat pipe working vacuum chamber. The evaporators of these two adsorption/desorption units are combined by a heat pipe. So, no valves are installed in the chilled water sub system and one vacuum valve connects the two adsorption/desorption chambers together to improve its performance. The performance of the chiller is tested. As the results, the refrigerating capacity and the COP of the chiller are, respectively, 8.69 kW and 0.388 for the heat source temperature of 82.5 degrees C, the cooling water temperature of 30.4 degrees C and the chilled water outlet temperature of 11.9 degrees C. For a chilled water outlet temperature of 16.5 degrees C, the COP reaches 0.432, while the refrigerating capacity is near 11 kW. There is in improvement of at least 12% for the COP compared with the former chillers. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.