Solar-heat-pump simulator

A solar assisted heat pump (SAHP) hardware simulator was constructed to demonstrate the potential of the vapor compression heat pump to obtain high COP's at high source temperatures, to explore the means to obtain such high efficiencies, and to test prototype hardware resulting from the SAHF development program. The original water coolant system which simulated heating loads was upgraded to accommodate liquid to air heat pumps. A further refinement to the simulator was the addition of a on-line data acquisition and reduction facility. Testing of an experimental mockup heat pump designed to operate efficiently under SAHP system conditions demonstrated that very high COP's can be achieved with conventional components. One prototype marketable SAHP constructed by Northrop has been tested under steady state conditions using the simulator.