Experimental Study and Modeling of Ground-Source Heat Pumps with Combi-Storage in Buildings

Abstract

There is a continuous growth of heat pump installations in residential buildings in Germany. The heat pumps are not only used for space heating and domestic hot water consumption but also to offer flexibility to the grid. The high coefficient of performance and the low cost of heat storages made the heat pumps one of the optimal candidates for the power to heat applications. Thus, several questions are raised about the optimal integration and control of heat pump system with buffer storages to maximize its operation efficiency and minimize the operation costs. In this paper, an experimental investigation is performed to study the performance of a ground source heat pump (GSHP) with a combi-storage under several configurations and control factors. The experiments were performed on an innovative modular testbed that is capable of emulating a ground source to provide the heat pump with different temperature levels at different times of the day. Moreover, it can emulate the different building loads such as the space heating load and the domestic hot water consumption in real-time. The data gathered from the testbed and different experimental studies were used to develop a simulation model based on Modelica that can accurately simulate the dynamics of a GSHP in a building. The model was validated based on different metrics. Energetically, the difference between the developed model and the measured values was only 3% and 4% for the heat generation and electricity consumption, respectively.