Paper No 142 – Efficiency Improvement Of A High Capacity Transcritical CO2 Heat Pump For Human Comfort In Large Buildings – 14th IEA Heat Pump Conference, Chicago, USA
Transcritical CO2 heat pumps have the potential to be environmentally friendly to decarbonize buildings. This technology is very efficient for water heating applications. However, they generally exhibit poor efficiencies for space heating due to high return temperatures. This paper presents new experimental test data obtained by operating a single screw industrial heat pump for space heating and cooling in large buildings. This transcritical CO2 pilot-scale prototype has a maximum heating and cooling thermal capacity of 1.35 and 1.05 MW, respectively. The results show that decoupling the thermal load from the CO2 heat pump by the use of thermal storage tanks increases substantially the coefficient of performance (COP) of the system compared to the reference case (without heat storage and temperature conditioning).