IEA-ECBCS Annex 48 : Heat Pumping and Reversible Air Conditioning

In June 2006, the IEA Energy in Buildings and Communities Programme (EBC, formerly ECBCS) Executive Committee decided to launch the three-year working phase of the Annex 48 on Heat pumping and reversible air conditioning.

Co-Operating Agents

J.Lebrun, Ph.André (University of Liège, Belgium)

Background

Substituting a heat pump to a boiler may save more than 50% of primary energy, if electricity is produced by a modern gas-steam power plant (and even more if a part of that electricity is produced from a renewable source). “Heat Pumping” is probably today one of the quickest and safest solutions to save energy and to reduce CO₂ emission. Most of air-conditioned commercial buildings offer attractive retrofit opportunities, because:

When a chiller is used, the condenser heat can cover (at least a part of) the heating demand;
When a chiller is not (fully) used for cooling, it can be (at least partially) re-converted into heat pump.

The retrofit of an existing building and, even more, the design of a new one should take all possibilities of heat pumping into consideration, in such a way to make air conditioning as “reversible” as possible. Different techniques are already available, but a recent survey of monitoring results established in Germany made still appear a lot of faults, lacks of optimisation and surprisingly low COP (coefficient of performance) after, at least, one year of operation. It appears that the many mistakes would not have been discovered without monitoring. It also appears that these mistakes and disappointing results are mainly due to a lack of good understanding of the dynamic behaviour of the systems at design stage, a lack of simulation work, a lack of instrumentation, for satisfactory commissioning, optimal control and fault detection.

Project Description

The aim of this project is to promote the most efficient combinations of heating and cooling techniques in air conditioning.

Specific goals

To allow a quick identification of heat pumping potentials in existing buildings
To help designers in preserving the future possibilities and in considering “heat pumping” solutions
To document the technological possibilities of heat pumping
To improve the operation (including commissioning) of building equipped with heat pumping systems
To make available a set of reference case studies.

These goals will be achieved by performing five different subtasks, whose content is very briefly summarized hereunder:

Subtask 1: Analysis of building heating and cooling demands and of equipment performances

Classification among different building types
Characterization of existing HVAC systems
Use of simulation models to identify the best heat pumping potentials

Subtask 2: Design

Elaboration of pre-design rules
Definition of evaluation criteria
Project of sequential design methodology (including retrofit)

Subtask 3: Global performance evaluation and commissioning methods

Development of evaluation methods devoted to heat pump solutions
Tests with synthetic data and with measured data
Development of computer-based tool for heat pump system operation

Subtask 4: Case studies and demonstrations

Documentation of reference case studies
Use of case studies to test the methods and tools developed in the annex
Conversion of most successful case studies into demonstration projects.

Subtask 5: Dissemination

Website
Paper work (leaflet, handbooks)
Workshops, seminars and conferences.

Participating countries and organizations

Belgium: University of Liège(Thermodynamics Laboratory) and University of Leuven
France: Armines (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris), Greth, INES and ClimateMaster
Germany: Fachhochschule of Nürnberg, TEB Gmbh KE and University of Stuttgart
Italy: Polytechnic University of Turin
Canada: Concordia University (Montréal)

External links

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