ENERGY CONSERVATION IN THE HEATING OF COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS USING WASTE HEAT OPERATED 0• HEAT PUMP

Abstract

In the present work a brief study of heat pumps and its applications in heating of commercial building for energy conservation has been given. Various heat pumps are discussed with their advantages and limitations. A room air conditioner which was available in the laboratory was converted into a heat pump and taken as the experimental set-up in this work. Low pressure steam was generated by a boiler fabricated in the laboratory and experiments were also conducted to study the performance of the heat pump using the low pressure steam. The performance of the air conditioner as heat pump was studied using electrical resistance heaters which is the most commonly used method of heating the rooms in winter. The performance of the test unit, when using the low pressure steam was compared with the performance of electrical resistance heating. The results of this investigation indicate that COP of heat pump is not much affected by the ambient or by room temperature. The COP of heat pump, when using low pressure steam is always more than, when it is run on electrical heaters alone. For the given room a saving of about 2 kW in energy was observed in this investigation. Over a period of approx. 6 hours of system operation during the night tim