Abstract
Thermal-economic evaluation represents an effective tool to optimize thermal systems. This study presents a mathematical model that encloses the physical variable equations and a set of equations that define the purchase cost of the main system components. The main objective of this study is the thermo-economic optimisation of solar thermal systems for residential building applications, considering a multi-objective approach. The simulations were performed through a MatLab code, by implementing an elitist variant of NASGA-II. The numerical model disclosed a Pareto front considering the optimal trade-off solutions for the minimum investment cost and the maximum solar collection efficiency. The optimal solutions disclose a set of optimal solutions for which the solar collection efficiency vary 28.3% and 77.0% and the investment costs vary between 2,099€ and 3,308€. Results show that gains in solar collection efficiency above 70% imply a great increase in the total purchase cost, implying a bump of almost 1,000€, from a total investment cost of 2,200€ to 3,200€. As a conclusion, the solar collector area is one of the most important decision variables in the multi-objective optimization of thermal-economic analysis of solar thermal systems.
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Acknowledgements
The first author would like to express her gratitude for the support given by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the Post-Doc Research Grant SFRH/BPD/121446/2016. This work has been supported by FCT within the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2019 (ALGORITMI) and Project Scope UID/EMS/04077/2019 (METRICS).
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Ferreira, A.C., Silva, Â., Teixeira, S. (2019). Multi-objective Optimization of Solar Thermal Systems Applied to Residential Building in Portugal. In: Misra, S., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2019. ICCSA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11624. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24311-1_2
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