Dynamic Simulation of Central Solar Heating Plant with Seasonal Storage (CSHPSS) with TRNSys Software
Abstract
Solar energy is one of the renewable energies used for the heating or production of DHW (Domestic Hot Water) for buildings (residential, industrial, tertiary, etc.). Solar energy can be developed on a large scale, as for a district or a city, to meet the energy demand of several buildings connected to one another by a heating network. These thermal solar power plants integrated on heating networks can offer good performance, in particular because of the possible coupling with seasonal storage tanks: this makes it possible to store a surplus of produced energy in summer to restore in winter and thus take advantage of solar energy throughout the year. This is known as a Central Solar Heating Plant with Seasonal Storage (CSHPSS), (Novo and al., 2010; Mangold, 2007). Few CSHPSS systems exist and the design rules are not well identified (Bauer D, 2010 ; Lund, 1989 ; Matrawy, 1996 ; Peltola and Lund, 1992 ; Peltola and Lund, 1992a). The main objective of this work is to better understand the operating mode and to explore the potential of the CSHPSS with water hot water storage tank by using numerical experiments with TRNSys software. We want to obtain recommendations for the design of low temperature heating networks. From a methodological point of view, this work consists of identifying the most favorable configurations. In this study, the costs are not related to real projects and the energy costs presented here are just used to define a methodology to identify key parameters and design rules by a modeling method with numerical experiments.