Experimental and theoretical study on a solar assisted CO2 heat pump for space heating

In this paper, a solar combi-system which consists of solar collector and a CO2 heat pump is investigated experimentally and theoretically. Two experiments are primarily conducted to show the performance of this solar combi-system under different operation conditions. A system model is developed and validated in TRNSYS to analyze the influence of main components parameters. Subsequently, a multi-parameter optimization is carried out in GENOPT to obtain a final optimal result. The simulated results show that the optimized system can save 14.2% electricity and improve the solar fraction by 8%. The solar fraction of the optimized system can reach 71.1%. Finally, the optimized system performance is studied with the weather and load characteristics in Shanghai. Compared with the CO2 HP heating system alone, the solar assisted system can save 1790.8 kWh electricity on the basis of year round operation. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.