Analysis of an Air Source Heat Pump in Shanghai

China has the largest construction volume in the world with about 2 billion square meters of new buildings completed annually. Currently about 80% of these are categorized as high-energy buildings and more than 90% of new buildings are considered high life-cycle energy buildings. The speed of construction in China is amazing and it's stimulated even further by the fast rates of urbanization. In order to decrease energy consumption of buildings, there is a need for strong political will and implementation of strict building regulations. China is geographically a vast country and it's impossible to design a single building code for the whole country. Energy consumption per building in China is 2-3 times higher than that of the developed countries with similar climatic conditions, and buildings are less comfortable as a result of poor thermal performance and too little insulation in most of China's buildings. Although the Chinese government has issued many standards and codes in order to improve energy efficiency of buildings, little effect has appeared and less than 6% of newly constructed buildings comply with these standards. China is a large country with a complex climate that in the national standard (GB50176-93) it's divided into five climate zones. Because of the "Qin-Huai line", for severe cold and cold zones, they have central heating system while 14 provinces and nearly half of the population of China is living in the hot summer and cold winter zones (HSCW) where they don't have central heating system. This is the first reason why in these zones heat pump systems play a very important role in heating buildings. Air source heat pump (ASHP) as an optional product has already been widely applied in families and companies. This project reports a novel application of an air source heat pump system for cooling, heating and domestic hot water production in Shanghai for a typical apartment. In winter, the system was aim to solve the central heating problem. The system was combined with a Low-H_2O heat exchanger to decrease the supply water temperature in order to save energy. The heating return water temperature was set at 30 °C, 35 °C and 40 °C for heating in winter which is lower than the conventional air source heat pump system. This system composed by the ASHP and the STDFCU has been tested, from December to February, in an apartment, aiming to the energy saving and the user's comfort. We found, for each experiment, the values of heating capacity and energy consumption and we can say that the heat pump's power is always sufficient to heat the apartment except with the temperature at 40 °C and the internal temperature at 22°C. Moreover, the internal conditions are always good for the users with an internal temperature between 19 and 21 °C. The use of computer software can be useful to simulate the model and to compare results with the experimental's data. That's why we created a model of the whole system and simulated it on EnergyPlus, an energy analysis and thermal load simulation program. Starting with a simplified model, finally we simulated the apartment finding heating capacity of the same order of magnitude that in the experiments