Performance Assessment of Solar Assisted Absorption Heat Pump System with Parabolic Trough Collectors

Abstract

Abstract A solar assisted absorption heat pump (AHP) system was installed in Tianjin University for space heating in winter and heat water supply. The primary heat source for the AHP is supplied from parabolic trough collectors. In this paper, experimental and simulation are presented to give an overview assessment of the whole system. The performance of the solar collectors in steady and transient state was investigated, the thermal efficiency curve that characterizing the optical and heat loss of the collectors was carried out with a series of tests. For the whole system, the absorption heat pump performance during operating test was measured and presented. The simulation were performed by TRNSYS using the measured meteorological data and the estimated building load with the specific building type and structure, the daily and monthly operation showed that the solar radiation had significant impact on the ratio of useful energy provided by solar collectors, a high instantaneous solar fraction during the sunshine time while a very low average daily solar fraction was seen from the simulation results, this indicated that a thermal storage is necessary to improve the system performance and lower the auxiliary energy usage.