A Systematic Heat Recovery Approach for Designing Integrated Heating, Cooling, and Ventilation Systems for Greenhouses

Mohsen Ghaderi, Christopher Reddick and Mikhail Sorin ()
Additional contact information
Mohsen Ghaderi: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 Boul. de l’ Université, Sherbrooke, QC J1K 2R1, Canada
Christopher Reddick: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 Boul. de l’ Université, Sherbrooke, QC J1K 2R1, Canada
Mikhail Sorin: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 Boul. de l’ Université, Sherbrooke, QC J1K 2R1, Canada

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 14, 1-22

Abstract: Ventilation heat loss is one of the most important factors contributing to energy performance of greenhouses. This paper suggests a systematic method based on dynamic pinch analysis (PA) to design an integrated heating, cooling, and ventilation system that uses ventilation waste heat in a cost-effective and energy efficient way. A heat recovery system including an air handling unit, borehole thermal storage, and a heat pump is proposed to investigate all heat integration scenarios for an entire year. In the first step, the heat integration scenarios are reduced to a few typical days using a clustering technique. Then, a generic methodology for designing a heat exchanger network (HEN) for a dynamic system, ensuring both direct and indirect heat recovery, is presented and a set of HENs are designed according to the conditions of typical days. Afterwards, the best HEN design is selected among all design alternatives using a techno-economic analysis. The whole procedure is applied to a commercial greenhouse and the best HEN configuration and required equipment sizes are calculated. It is shown that the best-performing design for the greenhouse under study produces primary energy savings of 57%, resulting in the shortest payback period of 9.5 years among all design alternatives.

Keywords: greenhouse; pinch analysis; heat exchanger network; clustering; techno-economic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/14/5493/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/14/5493/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:14:p:5493-:d:1198269

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().