Investigation of transient behaviour of combi boiler type appliances for domestic hot water

© 2015 Elsevier Ltd.Combi boiler type appliances heating both space and water demanded for use and consuming natural gas as the energy source are one of the most common branches of the household goods. This study touches mainly on two types of combi boiler concepts to investigate only domestic hot water (DHW) heating function since highly efficient condensing appliances have been manufactured in terms of space heating. First concept has the normal working configuration of the heat exchangers of a standard combi boiler; whereas, the second has the opposite operation order of the heat exchangers. 1D transient energy equations have been constructed with the help of the laws of thermodynamics in order to model the heat exchangers in a standard combi boiler. After obtaining a general mathematical model for the standard combi boiler, the energy equations have been discretised with finite difference scheme, and solved numerically in Matlab®. Subsequently, numerical results are validated experimentally in different working modes of a standard appliance. As the last step, similar results are obtained for the second proposed concept using the related equations of the standard combi model to compare both concepts on a numerical basis