Study, modeling and analysis of heat pumping solutions in a commercial building

This work is carried out in the frame of the IEA-ECBCS (International Energy Agency – Energy Conservation in Buildings and Community Systems) Annex48: “Heat Pumping and Reversible Air Conditioning”. The aim of this work is to study the possibility of integration of a reversible heat pumping system into the existing HVAC system of a “commercial” building (which includes laboratories).

A pre-audit of the actual HVAC installation is carried out and presented. Numerical models of the building and of the coupled HVAC installation are developed and implemented on EES (Engineering Equation Solver, ©F-Chart Software) to run yearly simulations. The main retrofit opportunity is the use of reversible heat pumping, with the extracted air as heat source, to heat the building. Other retrofit possibilities, as “change over” technique or cool thermal energy storage, are also modelled, simulated and analysed. The environmental and economical aspects of each retrofit opportunity are approached.

The reversible heat pumping coupled with a change over technique is generally able to satisfy the heating demand of the building. However some interventions of the existing natural gas condensing boilers, as back boosting devices, are sometimes necessary during winter. The economical and environmental studies reveal a quite short payback time and a significant reduction of CO2 emissions. The advantages of the cool thermal storage solution are not obvious and have not been highlighted in the present case.