Model Predictive Control for Unlocking Energy Flexibility of Heat Pump and Thermal Energy Storage Systems: Experimental Results

TL;DR

This paper develops a model predictive control framework for heat pump and thermal energy storage systems to enhance demand-side management, validated through simulations and real-world experiments, supporting renewable energy integration.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic design framework for energy-flexible MPC control of HPTES systems, combining flexibility assessment and exploitation, validated with real-world experiments.

Findings

MPC-based DSM effectively evaluates and utilizes HPTES flexibility.

Real-world experiments confirm the control strategy's viability.

The approach improves demand response capabilities of HPTES systems.

Abstract

Increasing penetration of renewable energy sources (RES) and electrification of energy systems necessitates the engagement of demand-side management (DSM) to help alleviate congestion in electricity grid. Heat pump and thermal energy storage (HPTES) systems, being energy efficient solutions, are becoming popular in modern buildings and are promising to contribute to demand-side management (DSM) due to their significant share in household electricity consumption. For typical HPTES systems, this paper presents a systematic design framework covering a control-oriented modeling process and energy-flexible model predictive control (MPC) design. The proposed MPC-based DSM strategy offers an innovative solution for efficient DSM by following a two-step DSM framework. In the first step, flexibility assessment is performed to quantitatively evaluate the flexibility potential of the HPTES system by solving a mixed-integer economic MPC problem. In the second step, flexibility exploitation is achieved through reacting to feasible demand response (DR) requests while respecting system constraints. Both numerical simulations and real-world experiments are performed based on a real HPTES installation to showcase the viability and effectiveness of the proposed design.