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Title: A novel Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) heat recovery system model: Development and validation

Journal Article · · Energy and Buildings
 [1];  [1];  [1];  [2];  [3]
  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  2. Daikin Industries LTD, Osaka (Japan)
  3. Daikin US Corporation, New York, NY (United States)
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As one of the latest emerging HVAC technologies, the Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) system with heat recovery (HR) configurations has obtained extensive attention from both the academia and industry. Compared with the conventional VRF systems with heat pump (HP) configurations, VRF-HR is capable of recovering heat from cooling zones to heating zones and providing simultaneous cooling and heating operations. Moreover, this could lead to substantial energy saving potential and more flexible zonal control. In this paper, a novel model is developed to simulate the energy performance of VRF-HR systems. It adheres to a more physics-based development with the ability to simulate the refrigerant loop performance and consider the dynamics of more operational parameters, which is crucial for representing more advanced control logics. Another key feature of the model is the introduction of component-level curves for indoor units and outdoor units instead of overall performance curves for the entire system, and thus it requires much fewer user-specified performance curves as model inputs. The validation study reflects good agreements between the simulated energy use from the new VRF-HR model and the laboratory measurement data across all operational modes at sub-hourly time steps. The model has been adopted in the official release of the EnergyPlus simulation program since Version 8.6, which enables more accurate and robust assessments of VRF-HR systems to support their applications in energy retrofit of existing buildings or design of zero-net-energy buildings.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC); USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1532320
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1496313
Journal Information:
Energy and Buildings, Vol. 168, Issue C; ISSN 0378-7788
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 22 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (1)

Operation Algorithms and Computational Simulation of Physical Cooling and Heat Recovery for Indoor Space Conditioning. A Case Study for a Hydro Power Plant in Lugano, Switzerland journal August 2019

Figures / Tables (14)

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Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
Variable Refrigerant Flow
Heat recovery
Energy modeling
Validation
Building performance simulation
Controls