The control strategy and economic analysis of a new type of solar cold storage

Abstract

Cold storage is a crucial link in cold chain. In recent years, the proportion of energy consumption in cold storage has increased rapidly. The combination of solar power generation technology and demand side management (DSM) technology is a promising technology that can save energy and adjust to electricity price structure. In this paper, a new solar cold storage system is proposed for this technology. The refrigeration cycle is driven by the electricity generated by the low-price electricity at night and the solar photovoltaic panel during the day. The cooling capacity is stored in the cold storage tank and supplied to the cold storage for cooling according to the demand. The main purpose of this study is to establish a universal Simulink model for the new solar cold storage system, and to find the best control strategy to minimize the electricity cost. After the comparative analysis of the experimental results and the simulation results, the temperature compensation coefficient in the final Simulink model is 1.09. By comparing the experimental results of five schemes, the scheme D is selected as the best control scheme. The results of 24 hour experiment show that the electricity generated by photovoltaic panels can save 65.27% of the electricity cost of the whole system, and the total electricity cost of the system is only 32.62% of the direct refrigeration cold storage.