Solar assisted ground source heat pump system - modelling and simulation

Abstract: The influence of control strategies and storage tank sizes on the system performance of a solar thermal assisted ground source heat pump(SAGSHP) installation has been investigated. The system investigated is in the design stage and will be implemented in the project Slottsholmen in Västervik, Sweden during 2015. Using the simulation software TRNSYS the suggested system has been modelled in its entirety and the response of the system for different control strategies and storage tank size configurations have been investigated.The system is designed with a dual tank configuration where solar heat can either be used for direct domestic hot water(DHW) production(in a high grade tank) or utilized as additional source for the heat pumps(in a low grade tank) with the purpose of increasing evaporation temperatures of the heat pumps. Four different control strategies have been investigated. Two strategies where either tank is prioritized, one where the two tanks are run in series and heat can be delivered at two temperature levels simultaneously and one strategy where the low grade storage tank is by-passed and heat is only utilized directly for DHW production. For each control strategy a series of different tank size configurations have been tested. Results show that the influence of control strategies dominate the effect of different storage tank size configurations. Solar fraction for the system varies between 0.10 and 0.13 between control strategies while variations between storage tank sizes are close to negligible. The electricity use of the SAGHSP system has been compared to a reference system where the solar collectors are switched off. The results show that fractional energy savings of the SAGSHP system ranges from 0.066 to 0.099 between control strategies. Interestingly the fractional energy savings increases for cases with lower solar fraction. For control strategies which prioritize DHW production the temperature level in the solar collector loop increased thus leading to lower solar collector efficiency and less collected heat. However, solar heat used directly for DHW production leads to a higher electricity savings than using the heat as source for the heat pumps which explains the decoupling of fractional energy savings from solar fraction. An attempt to quantify the value of the harvested solar collected heat is done by introducing a performance figure named ''Solar Savings Efficiency'' which is the ratio of the electricity savings compared to the reference system to the collected solar heat. The Solar Savings Efficiency ranges from 0.23 to 0.46 with the higher value registered for strategies which prioritize DHW production.