Dr. Xavier Daguenet

Sorption heat pumps can provide cooling based on renewable district heat or waste heat, thus expanding the scope of district heating networks (DHN) and making better use of existing renewable heat sources. On the other hand, sorption heat pumps in district heat transfer stations can also provide heat while significantly reducing the return flow of the district heating network compared to a station with ordinary heat exchanger. This increases the efficiency of district heating supply. However, commercially available sorption machines are not designed for DHN. Therefore, new sorption materials, ideally suited to the temperatures and applications in district heating networks, are being developed and incorporated in a heat & mass exchanger designed for reversible adsorption heat pumps.

A 1 kW closed sorption thermal energy storage system (TES) prototype is set-up and tested at HSR-SPF. This can be charged in summer with heat from solar thermal collectors or with electricity from photovoltaic modules. The system can achieve a significantly higher volumetric energy density compared to sensible hot water storage. The closed sorption system is designed to work with different sorbent-sorbate pairs (NaOH-H₂O, LiBr-H₂O and LiCl-H₂O). Scaling to larger units with correspondingly higher power will be done in the frame of SCCER HaE (Heat and Electricity).

This project focuses on the use of a thermal driven adsorption heat pump using waste heat stemming from industrial processes.

This project is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). IBM research is leading the umbrella project; in addition to the SPF (adsorption heat pump development), the EMPA (Building Energy Materials and Components), the ETH Zürich (Complex Materials), the HEIG-VD (Solar Energetics and Building Physics) as well as the PSI (Technology Assessment Group) are implied in subparts of this project.

Im Projekt CoCoSol wird ein Heiz- und Kühlsystem mit 3–5 kW Leistung aufgebaut, welches mit PV-Strom angetrieben werden kann. Es werden verschiedene Varianten miteinander verglichen. Der messtechnische Vergleich der Systemvarianten und die Erstellung von Computermodellen liefern Hilfestellungen in der Planung vergleichbarer Projekte. Die Resultate finden Eingang in den IEA SHC Task 53 "New Generation Solar Cooling and Heating Systems".

CoCoSol wird vom Bundesamt für Energie (BFE) finanziell unterstützt.

In order to push the energy transition seven Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER) have been launched by the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI). One of them, the SCCER EIP (Efficiency of Industrial Processes), focuses on the question of how to support industry to enhance the energy efficiency and reduction of CO₂ emission in order to reach the goals of the Swiss national «Energy Strategy 2050». The SPF is part of this consortium and supports industry partners in better management of energy consumption by energy flow analysis and by the investigation on the integration of renewable energy sources for process heat.

COMTES main purpose is the development and demonstration of various techniques enabling to store heat over a long period (seasonal storage) with a high energy density and with less losses than conventional water storage. This should enable to increase the building heat solar fraction coverage.At SPF, investigation are lead on an absorption/desorption concept using sodium hydroxide (NaOH) and water as thermochemical heat storage mediums.

EMPA and Kingspan Renewables are SPF main project partner in this subproject line. The project is supported European Union's in the frame of the FP7 Research and Innovation funding programme (FP7, Project no. 295568)