The main purpose of this study is to compare a heat pump system with a SunCool collector system based on the key performance factors. SunCool collectors are sorption integrated solar thermal collectors which produce both heating and cooling. This analysis is carried out in TRNSYS software. The heat pump system is designed with the PV system and then it’s been simulated in TRNSYS for certain climate conditions. The SunCool collector system has been simulated in the existing TRNSED application by using the TRNSYS input file of the system. The parametric study has also been done to get the ideal size of the system and to check how the system works under different parametric conditions. The results of the simulations have been evaluated in terms of total electric consumption, solar fraction, self-consumption and total energy production. Both systems have been simulated for the location of Madrid, Spain. The same load data has been used in the simulation of these systems.
A simulation study shows that the heat pump system provides 405 MWh of energy to DHW system per year and 351 MWh of energy to space heating and cooling system per year. The SunCool collector system provides 391 MWH and 101 MWh of energy to DHW and space cooling system respectively. The control system of SunCool collector system doesn’t provide energy to space heating. The heat pump system has a maximum load at night hence during the night it takes electricity from the grid and during the day it gives it back to the grid. Almost 80% of the total electricity load is provided by the grid.
The comparison study of the simulation results shows that the PV+heat pump system provides the full amount of load while the SunCool collector system provides 97% of DHW load and 51% of cooling load with the same number of collectors. Even though the heat pump provides the full amount of load, the electricity consumption of the system is quite higher at 246 MWh per year although for SunCool collector system it’s just 20 MWh per year. Solar fraction of the SunCool collector system is 64% whereas for heat pump system it’s 17%. Hence to select the feasible option between heat pump system and SunCool collector system, an economic analysis must be done by considering the price of the collectors, feed-in tariff and price of the grid electricity.