Capacity control in ground source heat pump systems part II: Comparative analysis between on/off controlled and variable capacity systems

In the present paper, as the second part of two, modeling and simulation was carried out for a Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) system in the presence of all the most important interacting sub-systems such as building, ground heat source, electrical auxiliary heater, and the heat pump unit in order to make a fair and comprehensive comparison between the annual performance of on/off controlled and variable capacity systems. The annual modeling showed that dimensioning of the on/off controlled GSHP based on the peak heat demand of the building plays a significant role when the two control strategies are compared: if the on/off controlled GSHP is dimensioned to cover only 55% of the peak heat demand of the building, the electrical auxiliary, which then covers about 10% of the annual heating demand of the building, makes the SPF of the on/off controlled GSHP to be lower than the one of the variable speed system. On the contrary, when the on/off controlled system is dimensioned to cover more than 65% of the building’s peak heat demand, i.e. more than 95% of the annual heat demand of the building, there is no considerable difference between the SPFs of the on/off controlled and variable capacity systems.