Abstract
The recent surge in electricity prices has increased the demand for cost-effective and sophisticated heat pump controllers. As domestic floor heating systems are becoming increasingly popular, there is an urgent need for more efficient control systems that include also heat buffer tanks to account for fluctuating energy prices. We propose a scalable thermal model of the hot water buffer tank together with a mixing loop and evaluate its operation and performance on an experimental Danish house from the OpSys project. We experimentally assess the buffer tank’s quality by selecting the proper size and number of virtual layers using an industry-standard controller. Finally, we integrate the buffer tank and mixing loop into the heating system and create an intelligent Stratego controller to examine their performance. We analyze the tradeoff between cost and comfort for different buffer tank sizes to determine when a buffer tank or a mixing loop should be included in the system. By providing a detailed understanding of the buffer tank and mixing loop, our study enables the clients to make better decisions regarding the appropriate buffer tank size and when to install a mixing loop based on their specific heating needs.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Per Printz Madsen and Hessam Golmohammadi for their extensive help in understanding the physics of the buffer tanks. This research is partly funded by the ERC Advanced Grant Lasso, the Villum Investigator Grant S4OS, and DIREC: Digital Research Centre Denmark.
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Hasrat, I.R., Jensen, P.G., Larsen, K.G., Srba, J. (2023). Modelling of Hot Water Buffer Tank and Mixing Loop for an Intelligent Heat Pump Control. In: Cimatti, A., Titolo, L. (eds) Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems. FMICS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14290. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43681-9_7
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