Scientific and technological progress and future perspectives of the solar assisted heat pump (SAHP) system

Yi Fan, Xudong Zhao, Zhonghe Han, Jing Li, Ali Badiei, Yousef Golizadeh Akhlaghi and Zhijian Liu

Energy, 2021, vol. 229, issue C

Abstract: Among all available solar technologies, solar-assisted heat pump (SAHP) is the most popular technology for low- and medium-temperature applications, i.e., drying, space heating, and water heating. This paper presents a critical review of the SAHP, leading to identification of the key technological challenges with the current SAHP technology, including (1) poor energy performance at low ambient temperatures; (2) difficulty in coupling solar thermal panels with heat pumps to achieve increased operational time and reduced electrical energy usage; (3) mismatch between heat demand of the building and heat supply of the SAHP system; and (4) lack of multi-functional modelling tool. A recently developed SAHP technology is introduced, which can effectively tackle the challenges with the current SAHPs, thus achieving enhanced solar efficiency, improved heat pump energy efficiency, and fast responsive time to the heat demand of buildings. The future research directions of the SAHP were identified: (1) multi-source heat pump; (2) heat pump defrosting capacity using waste heat and renewable energy; (3) advanced heat storage and exchange unit (HSEU) technology; and (4) advanced machine learning and multi-objective evolutionary optimisation models for performance prediction and optimisation of the SAHP using big datasets.

Keywords: Solar-assisted heat pump; Solar efficiency; Coefficient of performance; Heat storage and exchanging unit; Multi-source heat pump; Machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544221009671
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:229:y:2021:i:c:s0360544221009671

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.120719

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().