Heating performance of swimming pool incorporated solar assisted heat pump and underground thermal energy storage tank: A case study

Abstract

In this study, utilizing a renewable energy system was proposed to eliminate conventional sources used for swimming pool heating applications. The proposed configuration mainly consisted of a private swimming pool, ground source heat pump, buried energy storage tank, and solar collectors. The solution of transient heat transfer around the storage tank and energy equations for the other configurations are integrated with MATLAB software to develop an analytical model. Analytical model was used to detect the most suitable swimming pool heating system parameters offering a reasonable heating performance year-round as well as to evaluate different performance parameters of the system. The typical meteorological data of Gaziantep city was embedded into the developed computer program to find reasonable water temperatures, solar collector area, suitable tank volume, and time to arrive at periodic conditions. The results showed that when the area of the pool was simulated at 50 m2, the underground thermal energy storage tank volume equated to 300 m3, while the collector area became 100 m2, and the periodic operation was equal to 6 years. Finally, the results showed that the swimming pool heating system derived the majority of its total energy requirement from solar energy (being 86.18%), in addition to utilizing the heat pump (being 13.82%), during the first year of operation.