Determining Key Parameters and Guidelines for the Design of an Electrically Activated Concrete Slab for Peak Shifting in a Light-Weight Residential Building in a Northern Climate

A thermal storage system for residential buildings in a Northern climate is developed for electrical peak shifting and shaving. To facilitate implementation, only commercially available products are used for the system in conjunction with common construction methods. A thermal model is created with the TRNSYS simulation software and validated using data from a two-year monitoring campaign. The thermal model is used to identify key system parameters and propose system design guidelines. It is determined that, for residential buildings with a footprint varying between 80 m2 to 200 m2, the basement floor slab can be used for thermal storage with electrical heating cables and that the entire basement heating load can, during the peaks, be shifted to off peak periods. The optimal assembly for the basement floor is composed of 102 mm of extruded polystyrene insulation followed by 152 mm of concrete. The electric heating cables are positioned at the bottom of the concrete layer. This assembly can be controlled with the air set point temperature. The air setpoint temperature of basement rooms during charging needs to be 2 degC higher than the air setpoint temperature during normal operating conditions. The required charging time for building footprints of 80, 120 160 and 200 m2 corresponds to 6.00, 5.51, 5.05 and 4.66 hours, respectively

NASA SBIR abstracts of 1991 phase 1 projects

The objectives of 301 projects placed under contract by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are described. These projects were selected competitively from among proposals submitted to NASA in response to the 1991 SBIR Program Solicitation. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 301, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference of the 1991 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA Field Center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number are included

A low energy house

PFC elaborat en Erasmus EPS a Ingeniørhøjskolen i KøbenhavnTreball desenvolupat dins el marc del programa 'European Project Semester'.CENERGIA is a consulting engineering company, established in 1982 by four employees at the Thermal Insulation Laboratory at the Technical University of Denmark (now: byg.dtu). EPS students of the IHK were asked to design a low energy house. This gives the company a fresh insight into a low energy house design from the mixed students. This year 48 students applied for the EPS program, making twelve mixed teams, 2 teams designing a low energy house. At the beginning, a brief was given to direct the project in accordance with the CENERGIA criteria’s. All teams had to work freely and organise themselves. The aim of this project is designing a low energy house which have to reach Class 1 (Danish standard class when house use less than 35.5 kWh/m2 per year)

Holistic management of a smart city thermal energy plant with sewage heat pumps, solar heating, and grey water recycling

This article introduces a modern thermal energy plant consisting of sewage heat pumps, a biogas boiler, thermal solar collectors, and grey water recycling. It further discusses advanced methods to achieve energy efficiency in the plant operation. The project is a collaboration between the industrial plant designer, the municipal plant owner, and the local academic institution. The article presents the framework for the collaboration. The overall target is to investigate how the experience and competence of the three partners can lead to improved operation using data-driven methods and optimization strategies. The industrial partner can closely follow up on its design and increase its knowledge of artificial intelligence and data-driven methods. The municipal partner is given a “free-of-charge” system review. New knowledge and reduced life cycle costs and emissions are possible outcomes. The academic partner gets access to a “living green laboratory,” a unique dataset, and the opportunity to validate developed models and optimization strategies. The plant represents the state-of-the-art for a medium scaled, local thermal energy production system in an existing building cluster. The design energy and emission targets are presented and compared to the operational results. Though the municipal partner can report good agreement between targets and results, an evaluation of the day-to-day operation identified practical examples of system conditions that Artificial Intelligence may improve. The article concludes with a description of plans for future work and a broader discussion of the impacts of introducing data-driven methods to real-life systems.publishedVersio

Heat Transfer in Energy Conversion Systems

In recent years, the scientific community’s interest towards efficient energy conversion systems has significantly increased. One of the reasons is certainly related to the change in the temperature of the planet, which appears to have increased by 0.76 °C with respect to pre-industrial levels, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and this trend has not yet been stopped. The European Union considers it vital to prevent global warming from exceeding 2 °C with respect to pre-industrial levels, since this phenomenon has been proven to result in irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes. These climate changes are mainly caused by the emissions of greenhouse gasses related to human activities, and can be drastically reduced by employing energy systems, for both heating and cooling of buildings and for power production, characterized by high efficiency levels and/or based on renewable energy sources. This Special Issue, published in the journal Energies, includes 12 contributions from across the world, including a wide range of applications, such as HT-PEMFC, district heating systems, a thermoelectric generator for industrial waste, artificial ground freezing, nanofluids, and others

Factories of the Future

Engineering; Industrial engineering; Production engineerin

Design of an Energy-Efficient Climate Control Algorithm for Electric Cars

A climatisation controller for a car with multiple objectives is developed, implemented and tested in simulations. The design focuses on electric cars and their specific characteristics. In this context the goal has been to fulfil common comfort and safety standards while having a low energy consumption. The main idea of the control in order to achieve this is to use a simplified model predictive control scheme to find the best compromise between those objectives. A special evolutionary algorithm and a simplified system model are developed for this purpose. Another feature of the control design is adaption of disturbance terms in this model based on their estimation. As interface to the hardware a second controller is introduced. The approach has been implemented for the electric car MUTE which is currently developed at the TU München. This implementation was verified to work with the available hardware and tested using a thermal car interior simulation model