Open AccessSolar assisted heat pump pilot plant management and troubleshooting by means of numerical modelling: a case study
Author(s) -
Luca A. Tagliafico,
Alessandro Cavalletti,
Chiara Marafioti,
Annalisa Marchitto
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of physics. conference series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.21
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1742-6596
pISSN - 1742-6588
DOI - 10.1088/1742-6596/1868/1/012029
Subject(s) - troubleshooting , heat pump , environmental science , thermal energy storage , storage tank , process engineering , pilot plant , thermal , computer science , meteorology , engineering , civil engineering , operations research , mechanical engineering , reliability engineering , waste management , thermodynamics , heat exchanger , physics
A solar assisted heat pump integrated with fossil burners provides the space heating and Domestic Hot Water (DHW) demand of the sport palace Palacus, Genoa. The plant complexity requires a Data Acquisition System (DAS) to perform diagnoses for problem troubleshooting. A DAS with a set of sensors able to measure every key parameter of the plant loses economic feasibility as the installation complexity increases. This compulsory lack of information can be handled with numerical modelling calibrated on the collected data. In the case study, a net variation in the thermal losses during night (where all the plant is off and the facility is closed) within the DHW storage tanks has been measured. Without any apparent reason, the temperatures reached within the tank at 8.00 a.m. can be either 33 °C or 50 °C. According to the approach of inverse heat transfer problems, a numerical simulation in TRNSYS17 is used to enquire the most likely causes of failure and to establish new regulation criteria. Thermal stratification and its destruction are studied to better understand the temperature trend in the DHW tanks.