Economic Optimal HVAC Design for Hybrid GEOTABS Buildings and CO2 Emissions Analysis

Abstract

Abstract:In the early design phase of a building, the task of the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) engineer is to propose an appropriate HVAC system for a given building. This system should provide thermal comfort to the building occupants at all time, meet the building owner's specific requirements, and have minimal investment, running, maintenance and replacement costs (i.e., the total cost) and energy use or environmental impact. Calculating these different aspects is highly time-consuming and the HVAC engineer will therefore only be able to compare a (very) limited number of alternatives leading to suboptimal designs. This study presents therefore a Python tool that automates the generation of all possible scenarios for given thermal power profiles and energy load and a given database of HVAC components. The tool sizes each scenario properly, computes its present total cost (PC) and the total CO 2 emissions associated with the building energy use. Finally, the different scenarios can be searched and classified to pick the most appropriate scenario. The tool uses static calculations based on standards, manufacturer data and basic assumptions similar to those made by engineers in the early design phase. The current version of the tool is further focused on hybrid GEOTABS building, which combines a GEOthermal heat pump with a Thermally Activated System (TABS). It should further be noted that the tool optimizes the HVAC system but not the building envelope, while, ideally, both should be simultaneously optimized.

Exploring the optimal design of computer control system for heating boilers in power plants

“…When the pressure value of the pipe network meets the set value, the inverter will start the circulating pump to work and realize the water supplement operation for the heat exchanger. When the amount of water in the heat exchanger reaches the set required position, the steam valve is opened immediately, and the heat engine is used to realize the steam injection operation of the heat exchanger [15]. After the heat exchangers interact with each other, heating and transportation for the residents can be realized.…”

Planning Low-Carbon Campus Energy Hubs

“…Considering carbon emissions as an additional objective to be minimized creates a Pareto frontier of solutions which trade off emissions reductions for cost increases, and vice versa. The full Pareto frontier of cost and emissions can be sampled using the -constraint method [8], [10], [11], or if the set of potential technologies is small, the results for all combinations can be explicitly calculated [9]. Evins [7] presents a multi-level model where building and energy hub variables are optimized in the upper-level while operation variables (including binary variables for fuel cell status) are optimized in the lower level.…”

“…The motivation for this paper is to bridge perceived gaps in the existing literature: a), a mixed-inter linear program (MILP) model for planning and incentivizing low-carbon energy hubs, considering an independent operator that may not share the low-carbon goals of planners, and b) incentivization of low-carbon goals via an optimized price for carbon. Picard and Helsen [9] evaluate only a limited number of possible equipment combinations in order to be able to evaluate all of their costs and emissions. Several authors [8], [10], [11] build MILP models, but without an independent operator.…”

“…The design of an entirely new multiple-energy system is sometimes known as greenfield design. Energy hub models for the optimization of planning and operation of multiple-energy systems have been developed at the building [6]- [9], district [10]- [12], and regional [13] scales. An energy hub framework which incorporates building equipment and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle charging to respond to frequency control is presented in [14].…”

Evaluation of Excess Heat Utilization in District Heating Systems by Implementing Levelized Cost of Excess Heat

“…Furthermore, in [32] it has been used to analyze the feasibility of a solar chimney power plant, proving its competitiveness against other renewable power production technologies. However, a significantly smaller amount of research has been carried out in the heat sector by implementing the levelized cost of heat method, with most papers focusing on the calculation of the total costs, as shown for a building in [33]. The levelized cost of heat has been used for example in [34] for determining the feasible level of heat savings and heat production on the European level, in [35] for the Fresnel solar system, and in [36] for co-firing solid, liquid, and gaseous fuel in a heat-only boiler, but none of these papers include excess heat in the analyses.…”