A study on the performance of a newly designed heat pump calorimeter

The heat pump calorimeter is the testing facility to investigate the performance of a heat pump using standard test conditions obtained from domestic or international standard organizations. Conventionally, the calorimeter consumes so much energy in order to control and maintain the entering water temperature test conditions of the water-to-water heat pump unit. To minimize this energy, a newly designed calorimeter for the water-to-water heat pump was proposed in this study. Experiments were conducted in both heating and cooling modes with variation in capacity and COP of heat pump unit. In heating mode, entering water temperature test conditions of 40 °C and 5 °C were set for the indoor heat exchanger and outdoor heat exchanger of the heat pump unit respectively. In cooling mode, entering water temperature of 25 °C and 12 °C were set for the outdoor heat exchanger and indoor heat exchanger of the heat pump unit respectively. The analysis of the test results from the experiment showed that the newly designed calorimeter was able to save about 75% or more of the total power consumption comparing with the conventional calorimeter for all heat pump capacity and COP that were investigated.