Optimized Design of Hot Water Storage in Solar Thermal Cooling Facilities

Abstract

Solar thermal installations can provide a significant contribution to the energy needs of cooling demand of single family buildings. Unfortunately oversizing facility elements is not uncommon. Most of the design flaws concern collector field or auxiliary elements, such as backup boilers or electric resistances inside storage devices. This leads to lower than expected facility COP and SCOP, but also higher cost. Customer dissatisfaction is the result. This paper presents a numerical model of the multiple purpose solar thermal facility installed at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) using the TRNSYS® tool. The solar cooling facility (http://termica.uc3m.es/solar.htm) is completely monitored for its performance characterization in the production of AC, DHW and heating. Operational data for various summer seasons have been recorded, simultaneously with 7 meteorological variables. The experimental facility includes a single effect BrLi absorption chiller working at part load under summer season. TRNSYS is a completely feasible platform for simulating solar facilities and is commonly used by researchers and planners, for its simplicity and ease manipulation. This simulation tool contains general solar cooling elements found in most experimental facilities and has been kept as simple as possible. The model developed aims at analyzing facility elements in order to resize collector field and storage volumes. Furthermore it allows studying different configurations of the facility and the control schemes. These configurations include different hot water storage capacities within the facility allowing comparing with the facility without any kind of storage excepting its own thermal inertia. The simulation has been validated with instantaneous and seasonal experimental data for different summer seasons including 2003, 2004 and 2005. Simulation results show that there is a hot storage tank capacity that optimizes the facility in terms of COP, SCOP and total cold produced. Even with no storage at all, the facility still improves its behavior from current operating conditions. Simulation and experimental results are compared and an optimum configuration of the facility is proposed.