Instrumentation guidelines and performance indices discussed at the 4th Annex 52 expert’s meeting in September

26 Nov 2019

The 4th international experts’ meeting of IEA HPT Annex 52, titled Long-term measurements of GSHP system performance in commercial, institutional and multi-family buildings, gathered 20 experts from seven countries in London, UK, on September 16th-17th.

Instrumentation guideline and performance indicators

The fourth experts’ meeting focused mainly on instrumentation and performance indicators other than SPF and COP. The instrumentation guideline draft document for large GSHP systems was presented by the instrumentation guideline sub-committee. The draft document points at two key instrumentation issues: hardware and data. The guideline will give recommendations on calibration, data collection intervals and data filtering. It was decided that one chapter in the guideline will be dedicated to distributed thermal sensing (DTS) in GSHP performance monitoring applications.

Within Annex 52, the aim is to identify and recommend performance indicators that will allow for evaluation of the source side ground circuit, as well as the heat pump unit performance and the load side circuit performance, including supplementary heating and cooling. Evaluation of these three performance levels should be useful for commissioning, fault detection, system optimization and future system development. At the meeting in London, suitable indicators and required instrumentation were discussed, as a first step towards a performance analysis and indicator guideline.

UK GSHP workshop

In conjunction with the experts’ meeting in London, the UK energy agency BEIS arranged a national workshop focusing on GSHP projects with UK participation. Progress to date of HPT Annex 52 was presented at this workshop.

Upcoming meetings

The fifth experts’ meeting will take place in Braunschweig, Germany, on March 19th-20th 2020.

The sixth experts’ meeting will take place in Norway in the fall of 2020.

New Annex 52 related publications

Scientific journal paper:

Naicker, S. S. and S. J. Rees. (2020). Long-term high frequency monitoring of a large borehole heat exchanger array. Renewable Energy 145 (2020) 15281542. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2019.07.008 Measurement data available as open access at http://archive.researchdata.leeds.ac.uk/272/