“Digital Heat Pump Lab” – a new laboratory for teaching and development of digital services for heat pumps
Digital services for heat pumps enable more optimal design, operation and maintenance of heat pumps in the field. Thereby, they are contributing to energy efficiency and longevity of the installed systems. With the number of heat pumps and cooling units expected to increase, ensuring the most energy efficient operation of the installed systems is of uttermost importance. The validation of newly developed services and thus the further roll-out is, however, often hindered by the unavailability of close-to-real-time two-way communication with heat pumps in realistic environments. To overcome this problem, a new research and teaching lab is being built at the Technical University of Denmark allowing close to real-time two-way communication with the physical units via an MQTT server. The lab is designed to be able to test water-to-water and air-to-water units with capacities of 4 kW to 12 kW heating, further testing of serial coupling of heat pumps and integration with storages is possible. Temperature and flow to the heat pumps can be controlled based on signals sent by the user in close to real time, while the actual heat pump response is measured and the data is sent back to the user. This set-up enables testing of many kinds of digital services for heat pumps including advanced control, fault detection, hardware-in-theloop testing, etc.