A novel method for the design of CHCP (combined heat, cooling and power) systems for buildings

The design of capacity and operation of CHCP (combined heat, cooling and power) plants applied to HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) in buildings entails a considerable difficulty, because efficiency and economic aspects frequently interact in a complex way. Due to the strong fluctuations in thermal demands, the evaluation of a given design usually requires detailed simulations and a significant amount of input data. This paper proposes simplified approaches to estimate the main parameters characterising the thermal performance of the plant (ATD(e) method) as well as to identify optimal designs for a given application under certain encouragement policies (annual PES (primary energy savings) strategy). In the ATDe method, the duration curve of ATD (aggregated thermal demand) is used to estimate, among others, the amount of heat and cooling effectively supplied to the final user for a given design of the plant. This procedure serves to achieve a quick, global evaluation of the thermal performance of CHP (combined heat and power) or CHCP plants with little computational effort. The annual PES strategy searches the optimal values for the engine capacity, the OP (operation period) or both for CHP and CHCP plants in a particular application, defined by its energy demands. Both methods have demonstrated a notably good performance in several test cases with different patterns of the thermal demands. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.