Installation and First Results of a Solar Assisted Heat Pump System

The importance of renewable energy resources are growing because of many reasons including the increasing costs of fossil fuels and the growing awareness of sustainability and environmental concerns. There are many different possibilities to use renewable energy systems in the domestic housing sector like photovoltaic for electrical power or solar collectors for thermal energy to provide space heating and hot water. Moreover there are more heat pump systems on the market using a borehole to upgrade the thermal energy and use it efficiently in heating systems. It is clear that individual house owners should become less dependent on fossil fuels by installing renewable energy systems such as solar-assisted heat pumps if they are to assist in contributing to reducing primary fossil fuels and CO2 emissions as agreed at the Kyoto summit. Significant research has been carried out in the field of solar-assisted heat pump system since the 70s but most of the technologies developed have stayed at the research level due to two primary reasons, namely poor control strategies and the inability to keep operating temperatures high enough to realize high coefficients of performance over the full year. Within the frame of the EC funded Endohousing project these issues are being investigated. The research focuses on the development of an in innovate technology that comprising integrating large unglazed solar roof collectors coupled to a heat pump whose operation is controlled via hi-tech control strategies to manage the movement of thermal energy effectively in different sections of the system.