Solar PV assisted Heat Pumps
Optimisation of the heating and cooling system for each building
The two main solutions that will be developed and evaluated in the project will be
- The Solar Assisted Thermal Driven Adsorption Heat Pump (AdHP)
- The Solar assisted DC powered HP with advanced heat storage in phase change materials (PCM).
Adsorption heat pumps supplied with heated water through solar collectors have received a lot of attention due to the high-energy prices and environmental concerns. The AdHP will use the natural gas installation to improve the integrability of this equipment in existing buildings. The solution will match effectively the heating demand will additionally provide a compacted solution to meet the cooling demand of the building.
RES coupled with DCHP and PCM heat storage will be of paramount importance for increasing the penetration of low carbon sources of energy into the heating and cooling markets. In fact, DCHPs Today are mainly used to adapt the energy consumption to the required load. This does not take into account the electricity source, particularly important in case of highly variable loads from PV panels. The addition of thermal storage would decouple the heat generation phase from the heat consumption phase. The same DC inverter technology could therefore be used to couple the HP to the solar PV source to convert the available electric load into heat in real time. Any heat generated is then loaded into the PCM storage that is sized in order to satisfy any heating requirements from the building.