Simultaneous thermodynamic and economic enhancement of heat pumps based on a new method for avoidable irreversibility assessment

Abstract

The paper presents a new method aimed at the simultaneous thermodynamic and economic enhancement of air-source and water-source heat pumps. The novel approach allows estimating the avoidable parts of the exergy destruction and investment expenditures by avoiding the need for ideal process introduction, being the most critical issue associated with the application of the existing advanced exergy-based methodology. In fact, within the proposed new method the values of the avoidable parts of investment expenditures of the kth component belonging to the considered heat pumps are determined assuming a greatly efficient component rather than not an extremely inefficient one. The proposed approach was applied to domestic hot water heat pumps using R410A and R134a to evaluate its potential. The results obtained suggested that at the investigated operation conditions the condenser and the evaporator are components for which minimising irreversibilities can provide simultaneous thermodynamic and economic enhancement.