Paper No 049 – Experimental study on an absorption heat pump prototype applied for rural residential heating – 13th IEA Heat Pump Conference, Jeju, Korea
In order to replace the inefficient and polluting boilers, an ammonia-water absorption heat pump prototype is proposed for rural residential heating. The prototype can be driven by the combustion of biogas that is widely available in rural areas. Experimental investigations are carried out to analyze its performance under different working conditions. During the experiment, the prototype works with an electric oil heater which simulates the biogas burner in real applications, and uses conduction oil as the heating medium. Experimental results indicate that at the ambient temperature of -5 °C, the prototype can provide 25 kW heating capacity and the supply water temperature is 50 °C, with the coefficient of performance and primary energy efficiency of 1.37 and 1.14, respectively. By introducing the intermediate process, 2.39 kW exhaust heat is recovered, and the exhaust heat temperature is reduced to 41.3 °C. Moreover, the primary energy efficiency of the proposed system is still greater than 1 even when the ambient temperature is reduced to -10 °C, showing an obviously better performance than that of the conventional boiler.