Track: Energy and Resource Efficiency

Abstract

Through the last decades, energy consumption presented a continuous increase and became a fundamental asset in every sector. Considering heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC), improvements have been progressively required, mainly when circumstances are also influenced by geopolitical and economical aspects. The present work discusses an exergy analysis of two existing heat pump (HP) technologies, air-source and ground-source for heating and cooling operations. These may be used for the replacement of the system of a critical environment, a bioterium, which currently comprises chillers for cooling and boilers for heating to provide environmental conditions that must be uninterruptedly maintained, thus requiring substantial energy consumption. With the purpose of exploring less demanding alternatives, an exergy analysis is performed in this work to establish a comparison between the two aforementioned HP technologies using an algorithm executed in Python. For both equipment exergetic analyses, six different types of refrigerants are considered as well. In all scenarios, the ground-source HP presented a smaller exergy, alongside a considerably higher exergetic efficiency due to a smaller exergy destruction and a higher coefficient of performance (COP).