An Investigation on Potential Use of Ice Thermal Energy Storage System as Energy Source for Heat Pumps

It has been crystalclear to everyone that ice storage systems provide significant advantages inreducing cooling costs, balancing energy supply and demand profiles, andshaving peak loads. As the main purpose of ice storage systems is for coolingpurposes, separate heating systems, such as furnaces, heat pumps, electricalheaters, etc., are required for buildings with heating demands. This workoffers to use an ice storage system in the heat pump as the energy source.Comprehensive thermodynamic and economic analyses are conducted to assess theproposed system. The proposed system is implemented in an office building inIstanbul, Turkey. Thermodynamic studies indicate that while the overallenergetic and exergetic coefficient of performance (COP) values for the icestorage integrated air conditioning (AC) are calculated to be 4.57 and 2.04,respectively, they are 3.99 and 2.12 for the ice storage integrated heat pump.While the yearly operating cost for the traditional AC is 1.9 million TL, it is0.5 million for the ice storage integrated AC. The annual natural gasconsumption cost for heating is 295,000 TL, and 375,000 TL for the ice storageintegrated heat pump. The payback period of the ice storage integrated AC andheat pump system is observed to be 4.5 years. It may provide almost 8 millionTL savings at the end of 10 years. At the end of the present study, it isreached that the ice storage system has a promising potential to use in heatpumps as a low-temperature energy source. Also, it provides a moreenvironmentally friendly heating operation as it does not require fossil fuelsby removing the furnaces or provides higher COP for heat pumps.