An empirical approach for the LCA evaluation of heat pump units

The authors in this work aim to provide reliable quantitative scaling factors (power-mass ratios) that can be utilized to evaluate the environmental profile of energy systems for providing space heating, domestic hot water, and space cooling in buildings (residential and not). 17’741 vapor compression heat pumps and 17’021 charges of refrigerant gas per heat pump unit were included and evaluated in this study. The approach adopted consists of several steps, as follows: i) grouping the appliances on shared characteristics, ii) linking the capacities with mass values, iii) obtaining the best fitting curves, evaluated by R2 method. Uncertainty analysis via error propagation was also performed to check the consistency of the results. This verification was implemented by the Monte Carlo method and the null hypothesis test.