Juan Rodriguez Santiago1*, Peter Schossig2, Patrizia Melograno1, Wolfram Sparber1

institute of Renewable Energy, European Academy of Bolzano, Viale Druso 1, 39100 Bolzano, Italy
2Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy, Freiburg, Germany
*Corresponding Author, jrodriguez@eurac. edu

Abstract

In this article is going to be presented the IEA HPP project Annex34. This three year project has been initiated in October 2007 under the umbrella of the IEA Heat Pump Programme as a continuation of Annex 24 ’’Absorption Machines for Heating and Cooling in Future Energy Systems”, with the goal of reducing the environmental impact of heating and cooling by the use of thermally driven heat pumps (TDHP) [1].

The project is led by Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy (ISE) and divided in five different subtasks to work, as the main objective, on the identification and quantification of the economic, environmental and energy performance of integrated TDHP’s in cooling and heating systems for a range of climates, countries and applications.

Keywords: Heat pumps, sorption, energy savings, efficiency

1. Introduction

In the last years, and due to the increase of the oil price, there has been noticed a new interest in technologies, whose development had nearly been stopped not so long ago. Machines mainly based on sorption processes, usually working as water chillers, are being rediscovered and taking notoriety in a scenario that nowadays tries to save the maximum primary energy amount. Because of this, the interest in joining solar and geothermal energy, waste process heats — energy flows that could be defined as “free” — and this kind of technology that can be driven by these flows is growing.

The ability of these technologies to produce both cold and hot water within certain temperature levels is a very interesting solution, but no widely spread, that solves in some of the studied cases, the problem of having two different technologies seasonally used in the same facility (boiler/chiller). In this way, a considerable amount of the investment costs are going to be saved, that is nowadays one of the main important barriers found. Therefore the new concept may be more competitive compared with classically installed solutions.

The best example for those cases is the domestic market of heating and cooling, where an important number of new companies are appearing in the last years providing solutions with capacities under 20kW of chilling power and nearly 30kW of low temperature heating power.