Active thermal management for residential air source heat pump systems

As the future melting pot of different forms of energy, home energy system is one of the key enablers to the smart grid technology. The development of such kind of smart home technologies with focus on demand response has gained interest in order to exploit potential demand and supply flexibility of decentralized energy systems. This flexibility could be used to support the optimized operation of the renewable home energy systems, which may have volatile power output depending on fluctuating environmental conditions. An optimized demand response strategy leads directly to the reduction of carbon emission, energy cost saving as well as thermal comfort improvement. As one representative type of the renewable home energy systems, the air source heat pump has a considerable penetration rate on the electrical grid of residential quarters due to its low commissioning expenditure, high installation flexibility and better access possibility to the smart grid. Thus, the research and development of the active thermal management strategy based on residential air source heat pump system with respect to the evolving demand response technologies is selected as the focus of this dissertation. In Chapter 1, the developing trend of home energy systems and some basic demand response backgrounds are introduced. The drawbacks and difficulties of the existing home energy management system are argued while being merged into the future smart grid framework. Based on the requirement analysis and the state-of-the-art technologies, the solution approach from conception to validation of the active management strategy is proposed in Chapter 2. The target system to be investigated, comprising a typical air source heat pump system with a domestic hot water storage tank and a single-family house, are described in Chapter 3. The idea and technical implementation of the proposed solution are depicted in Chapter 4 and 5, including the self-adaptive system modeling approach, the predictive modulation solver for the electrical compressor as well as the demand-actuated domestic hot water tank management strategy. As another highlight of this dissertation, the Hardware-in-the-Loop test approach for home energy systems is developed in order to test, validate and evaluate the implemented control prototype under realistic operation conditions. In Chapter 6, the function principle and the composition of the Hardware-in-the-Loop test platform are introduced, including the multiphysical emulation system, the infrastructural design on signal level as well as the interfacing and integration of the software components. Following the proposed dynamic test approach, the developed prototype of the home energy management system is quantitatively evaluated by various assessment criteria under different realistic test scenarios in comparison to several existing commercialized solutions, which are explicitly analyzed in Chapter 7.