Economic NMPC for Multiple Buildings Connected to a Heat Pump and Thermal and Electrical Storages

This paper studies the impact of different types of energy storage integrated with a heat pump to improve energy efficiency in multiple radiant-floor buildings. In particular, the buildings and the heating generation system are decoupled through a 3-element mixing valve, which enforces a fixed flow rate but a variable temperature in the inlet water entering the building pipelines. The paper presents an optimal control formulation based on an Economic Nonlinear MPC scheme, in order to find the best compromise among different goals: make the heat pump work when it is more efficient, store electrical energy when it is cheap, store thermal energy in the tank when the heat pump is more effective, modulate the inlet water temperature to satisfy the user's comfort constraints, exploit the buildings thermal inertia. The nonlinearity of the system stems from the variable flow rate into the hot water tank due to the variable action of the mixing valve. The model is also time-varying due to the fact that the heat pump efficiency depends on external conditions. The simulation results show that the proposed optimal control algorithm is able to economically distribute energy among all storages in order to insure cost benefits (almost 20% electricity cost saving) and comfort satisfaction with the feasible computational effort. Copyright (C) 2020 The Authors.