Design, analysis and control of solar heating system with seasonal thermal energy storage

Abstract

The majority of the electricity consumption in Canadian single-family house is for space heating and water heating. Currently, around 99% house in Canada using the conventional grid electricity for those purposes. To utilize the sun’s free energy for space heating and domestic water heating, first a sessional solar thermal energy storage system (SSTES) has been designed and investigated to determine their thermal and electrical performance of a house consists of four persons in the Canadian climate environment. The detailed mathematical formulation and sizing of each SSTES system component have been developed. Similarly, the components mathematical modelling, sizing of solar collector-based TES system, a hybrid solar Photovoltaic thermal (PV/T) based TES system, a Photovoltaic based TES system has been designed. To validate the feasibility and numerical studies of the developed STES configurations, all configurations have been simulated in a professional thermal simulation software named as PolySun, and only solar collector-based TES system has been designed and simulated at MATLAB/Simulink environment packages. The proposed TES system performance have been compared with the existing conventional system. All configurations have been tested using the solar radiation and other weather data of St. John’s city/NL city in Canada. The main objective to design a suitable TES system for space heating and water heating so that the residence can save high monthly electricity bill. For experimental validation, an open source IoT platform named openHAB smart home automation is used as a home server, an ESP32 Thing microcontroller board has been used as Microcontroller unit where all sensors and output devices (relays, thermostat settings channels) are connected for data acquisition and control. The proposed setup is able to monitor the TES system parameters, and able to control locally/remotely and manually/automatically. The proposed system is the low cost, low power consumption prototype which will be a commercial solution of TES system monitoring and remote control.