Experimental investigation and evaluation of the performance of air-source heat pumps for indoor thermal comfort control

• Published in: Journal of mechanical science and technology Vol. 32; no. 3; pp. 1437 - 1447
• Main Authors: Wang, Zhihua, Wang, Fenghao, Ma, Zhenjun, Bai, Mengmeng, Liu, Shuai
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Seoul Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers 01.03.2018; Springer Nature B.V; 대한기계학회
• Subjects: Algorithms; Control; Cooling; Dynamical Systems; Engineering; Heat pumps; Heating; Indoor environments; Industrial and Production Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; Performance evaluation; Residential buildings; Room temperature; Temperature; Temperature control; Test chambers; Thermal comfort; Vibration; 기계공학; Indoor thermal comfort; Regulation performance; Evaluation method; Air-source heat pump
• ISSN: 1738-494X; 1976-3824
• DOI: 10.1007/s12206-018-0248-z

Air-source heat pumps (ASHPs) have been widely used in domestic buildings. However, the regulation performance of ASHPs for indoor thermal comfort control is influenced by the factors such as cold draft and slow response to the variation in room temperature. In this paper, a range of experiments was carried out for 14 ASHPs in an indoor environmental chamber under both cooling and heating conditions. A multi-index comprehensive evaluation model including the questionnaire survey method, the weighted scoring method and the quartile algorithm method was then adopted to analyze the tested data in order to give some intuitive indices to evaluate the regulation performance of ASHPs for indoor thermal comfort control. The results showed that unsatisfied factor of the overall thermal comfort under the cooling conditions was reached to 71 %. Besides, the precision of the temperature control was poor in both cooling and heating conditions, which manifesting ASHPs need a novel matched adjust mode and more intelligent control system to meet thermal comfort requirement. This study provided a reference basis for evaluating ASHP’s regulation performance on indoor thermal comfort.