Model-Predictive Control for Testing Energy Flexible Heat Pump Operation within a Hardware-in-the-Loop Setting

Model-predictive control is a smart control technique that can unlock the potential of the building's thermal production leading to improvements in energy efficiency or energy flexibility, which is obtained by a demand responsive operation based on external grid signals. This work explains the set-up of a Hardware-in-the-Loop experiment to test an energy flexible heat pump controller under realistic conditions. The developed simple, low-cost model-predictive control algorithm can easily be integrated with a traditional heat pump controller.