Dynamic Modelling and Validation of an Air-to-Water Reversible R744 Heat Pump for High Energy Demand Buildings

Abstract

This paper presents a reversible heat pump based on CO2 as the refrigerant, able to provide heating, cooling, and domestic hot water to high energy demand buildings. The unit was developed and tested under the EU H2020 project MultiPACK, which has the main goal of assuring the market about the feasibility, reliability, and energy efficiency of CO2 integrated systems for heating and cooling and promoting a fast transition to low environmental impact solutions. Within the project, the confidence raising was performed by installation and monitoring of fully integrated state-of-the art CO2 systems in the Southern European Climate. With the aim of predicting the unit behaviour under variable load and boundary conditions, a dynamic model of the entire unit was developed with commercial software, considering actual components and the implemented control system and it was validated with experimental data, collected at the factory’s lab before commissioning. The validation against experimental data collected during operation as a heat pump demonstrated a maximum percentage difference between the experimental and predicted value of gas–cooler heat flow rate equal to +5.0%. A preliminary comparison with the experimental data in chiller configuration is reported, however further development was required to achieve a satisfactory validation. Lastly, the numerical model was utilized to simulate a typical operation in heat pump configuration with the system coupled with a hot water tank storage for the production of domestic hot water and space heating; the model predicts higher COP when operating in domestic hot water operation due to the lower water inlet temperature.