Project description
Keeping homes and offices comfortable sustainably throughout the year
Buildings consume a tremendous amount of energy for heating and cooling. Transitioning away from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources (RES) is a powerful way to reduce emissions and mitigate global warming. The EU-funded Hybrid-BioVGE project is harnessing not one but two RES, the sun and biomass, to provide affordable and sustainable heating and cooling for homes and small office buildings. The hybrid technology will harness heat from both the sun and a multi-fuel biomass boiler, and an ejector chiller will facilitate cooling. Intelligent energy monitoring and control will enhance efficiency.
Objective
The Hybrid – BioVGE project has the primary objective of developing and demonstrating a highly integrated solar/biomass hybrid air conditioning system for space cooling and heating of residential and commercial buildings that is affordable, operating with improved efficiency and reduced need for maintenance. The proposed system will be driven by heat, using two renewable energy resources: solar thermal and biomass. Only a small amount of electricity will be needed for the circulation pumps and the control system (less than 5% of the total needs). Thus, it is expected that 95% of the building thermal load will be satisfied by renewable energy. The Hybrid-BioVGE project is a cooperation of seven key research institutions and companies of the required trans-disciplinary approach.
The proposed system will be composed by a number of major components, including solar collector field, biomass boiler, thermal energy storage unit using PCM, thermally driven variable geometry ejector chiller, heat distribution and intelligent integrated control system. The Hybrid – BioVGE system represents innovative solutions at both component and system levels. Component level innovations include e.g. the application low cost solar collectors, high performance variable geometry ejector chiller, multi-fuel biomass boiler. At the system level, innovation effort will be carried out in order to reduce system complexity and to develop an intelligent energy monitoring and control unit that will lead to efficient operation of its components, with reduced cost and little need for interference by the end user. The potential of the proposed technology will be demonstrated by testing three small scale prototypes, adequate for residential and small commercial buildings, under different European climatic conditions: heating load dominated; balanced heating and cooling load; and cooling load dominated. A TRL of 7 for the Hybrid – BioVGE system will be achieved by the end of the project.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringcontrol systems
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringthermodynamic engineering
- natural sciencesmathematicspure mathematicsgeometry
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energysolar energysolar thermal
- agricultural sciencesagricultural biotechnologybiomass
Keywords
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
4200-465 Porto
Portugal
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.