Preliminary Performance Test of a Combined Solar Thermal Roof System with Heat Pump for Buildings

In the present study, a novel solar thermal roof collector was developed by primarily exploiting components and techniques widely available on the market and coupled with a commercial heat pump unit. The proposed indirect series solar-assisted heat pump system was experimentally tested and preliminary system performance was investigated. Yet, the analysis based on indoor and outdoor testing predominantly focuses on the solar thermal roof collector. A detailed thermal model was developed to describe the system operation. Also, a computer model was set-up by using Engineering Equation Solver (EES) to carry out the numerical computations of the governing equations. Preliminary analyses show that the difference in water temperature could reach up to 18 °C while maximum thermal efficiency found to be 26%. Data processing of the series covering the test period represents that Coefficient Performance of the heat pump (COPHP) and overall system (COPSYS) averages were attained as COPHP=3.01 and COPSYS=2.29, respectively.