Open Access

ARTICLE

Research on Energy-Saving Performance of Intermittent Heating for Rooms in Hot Summer & Cold Winter Zone

by Guoqing Yu^1,*, Nan Fang¹, Dingke Hu², Wei Zhao³

1 School of Environment and Architecture, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, China
2 School of Mechanical Engineering, Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, Shijiazhuang, 050043, China
3 EDF (Sanmenxia) Urban Heating Co., Ltd., Sanmenxia, 472000, China

* Corresponding Author: Guoqing Yu. Email:

Energy Engineering 2023, 120(7), 1563-1582. https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2023.026951

Received 05 October 2022; Accepted 12 December 2022; Issue published 04 May 2023

Abstract

In the hot summer & cold winter zone in China, intermittent heating space for rooms is widely used. However, in comparison with continuous space heating, the energy-saving performance of intermittent space heating has not been sufficiently investigated. This paper studied the factors influencing the energy performance of intermittent heating for the representative office in hot summer & cold winter zone. Based on the heat balance method, a dynamic thermal model of the intermittent heating room was built and tested by experiments. And then, it analyzed the total space heating load, the amount of energy saving and energy saving ratio of the intermittent heating under different preheating hours, occupation hours, required room temperatures, air change rates, overall heat transfer coefficients (U-value) of windows and wall materials. If the adjacent rooms were not heated, for a typical room occupied about 10 h a day, the energy-saving ratio of intermittent heating was about 30% compared with continuous heating. But the preheating power was higher than two times of continuous heating. The results also indicated that the occupation hours had a significant effect on energy saving amount and ratio, it should be noted that the energy saving ratio by intermittent heating was much lower than the unoccupied period ratio. Relative to other factors, the heating temperatures, room air change rates and U-value of windows, and room envelope materials had little effect on energy efficiency. If the adjacent rooms were heated in the same manner as the room in question, the energy-saving ratio of the total load of intermittent heating was heavily reduced to 8.46%.

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Keywords

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