Abstract A standalone, compact, thermally driven ammonia-water absorption chiller designed to deliver a cooling capacity of 10.5 kW at ambient temperatures greater than 40 °C is presented. Heat and mass exchangers with novel microscale features and geometries are employed to minimize the physical size of the system. A diabatic distillation column based desorber and a shell-and-tube absorber with microscale features are used. Thermodynamic cycle modeling and heat and mass exchanger design methodologies are discussed. The performance of the packaged unit chiller is demonstrated experimentally over a wide range of operating conditions. The system delivered 10.6 kW of cooling at a COP of 0.63 at design conditions in a compact 0.7 m x 0.9 m x 1.0 m envelope. This work validates the scalability of microchannel heat exchanger technology from a proof-of-concept laboratory scale device to a residential-scale absorption heat pump.