Annual Energy Performance of a Solar/Biomass HVAC System: Experimental Characterization through Concise Cycle Tests
Abstract
This paper presents the results of a Concise Cycle Test (CCT) carried out on the HVAC system developed under the Hybrid-BioVGE project. The proposed system is driven by renewable energy sources (i.e., solar energy and biomass) and during the cooling season a thermally-activated variable geometry elector (VGE) chiller provides for the building cooling load. Seasonal performance of the system were assessed for both heating and cooling operating mode by selecting two short test sequences. Some components of the system were physically installed in the test rig, while others were emulated in TRNSYS and their performance was given to the test rig according to the Hardware-in-the-Loop approach. Results point out that a significant part of the system energy demand can be satisfied by solar energy: solar fraction is higher than 70% and 80% for heating and cooling season, respectively. Moreover, CCT results figure out that the VGE seasonal COP is almost doubled with respect to that typically obtained for fixed geometry ejectors.