Hourly Calculation Method of Air Source Heat Pump Behavior

The paper describes an hourly simplified model for the evaluation of the energy performance of heat pumps in cooling mode maintaining a high accuracy and low computational cost. This approach differs from the methods used for the assessment of the overall energy consumption of the building, normally placed in the so-called white or black box models, where the transient conduction equation is deterministically and stochastically solved, respectively. The present method wants to be the expression of the grey box model, taking place between the previous approaches. The building envelope is defined using a building thermal model realized with a 3 Resistance 1 Capacitance (3R1C) thermal network based on the solution of the lumped capacitance method. The simplified model evaluates the energy efficiency ratio (EER) of a heat pump through the determination of the hourly second law efficiency of a reversed Carnot cycle. The results of the simplified method were finally compared with those provided by EnergyPlus, a dynamic building energy simulation program, and those collected from an outdoor test cell in real working conditions. The results are presented in temperatures and energy consumptions profiles and are validated using the Bland-Altman test.