Thermodynamic investigations on an integrated heat pump with thermal storage for wind-solar hybrid heating

Heating with wind and solar energy is an effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Vapor Compression Heat Pumps (VCHP) were generally used to improve the utilization rate of wind power. However, normal VCHP driven by wind power or solar energy has low performances in low temperature environment and low supply temperature of heating water, and it is also difficult to achieve continues and stable heating because of the intermittence of wind power. The present paper introduces a new integrated heat pump system, in which a VCHP absorbs heat from the environment and sends it to an Absorption Heat Pump (AHP) as its low temperature heat source after temperature lift. Thermal storage system is also equipped for continues heating and it serves as the driving force of the AHP. The results show that the integrated heat pump can produce heating water at 50 C or even higher with a COP of about 1.42 when the environment temperature is as low as-30 C. Also, the power consumption of the VCHP accounts for only 5%-18% of the total energy input. This indicates that the energy consumed by the integrated heat pump can be mainly from off-peak electricity produced by the wind turbine.

Automated summary

The paper introduces a new integrated heat pump system that combines vapor compression heat pump and absorption heat pump to achieve continuous and stable heating in low temperature environment with low energy consumption.