Model Predictive Control Applied to Ground Source Heat Pumps

Abstract: Building heating is one of the most important sources of energy consumption. GroundSource Heat Pumps (GSHP) are efficient heating systems, particularly popular in the Nordiccountries. However, the GSHPs available for the consumer market today typically only utilizebasic control schemes that are relatively inflexible. More advanced strategies such as ModelPredictive Control (MPC) appear as a promising approach to improve comfort while reducingconsumption. The present thesis considers a typical user case of a single family house heatedby a ground source heat pump willing to reduce its environmental impact. We design a MPCcontroller to be used on top of the existing heat pump system and with almost no additionalhardware needed. Specific attention is dedicated to the system’s efficiency in order to reflectthe real working performances of a ground source heat pump. The controller is evaluated insimulation on different scenarios using an identified model of a single family house. The resultsshow the MPC strategy becomes most beneficial when including time varying prices or reducedcomfort during certain hours of the day. When both are conjugated the economic savings areup to 8% despite the loss of efficiency of the heat pump. The controller was implemented andtested on a real system with promising results.