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Enhancing User Comfort in Demand Response Solutions for Water Heaters: User-Centric Hot Water Management

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Smart Cities, Green Technologies, and Intelligent Transport Systems (VEHITS 2016, SMARTGREENS 2016)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 738))

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Abstract

Demand Response (DR) solutions for tank electric water heaters (WHs) let residential consumers benefit financially, however, a negative impact of DR on personal comfort may force users to reject them. To facilitate DR implementation in practice, there is a need to consider the end-user’s comfort. Typically, DR for WHs concerns only the user satisfaction with a variable water temperature. This paper extends the conventional control by considering the tap water flow as a variable during water activities. The main contributions of this paper are (i) a model to relate user comfort with the tap water flow rate, (ii) the control mechanism consisting of the pre-heating control and the flow control to maintain the user comfort. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed control coupled with the suggested user interface can inform about available trade-offs between energy consumption and comfort, and thus can help the user to rationally save energy for water heating.

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Acknowledgment

We would like to express our gratitude to the Go-Green and JPI IRENE projects.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Alexander Belov, Alexandr Vasenev, Nirvana Meratnia & Paul J. M. Havinga

Authors
  1. Alexander Belov
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  2. Alexandr Vasenev
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  3. Nirvana Meratnia
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  4. Paul J. M. Havinga
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alexander Belov .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Markus Helfert

  2. Corporate Technology, Software and Systems, Siemens AG, Munich, Germany

    Cornel Klein

  3. Innovation Value Institute, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

    Brian Donnellan

  4. Ford Research and Advanced Engineering, Dearborn, Michigan, USA

    Oleg Gusikhin

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Belov, A., Vasenev, A., Meratnia, N., Havinga, P.J.M. (2017). Enhancing User Comfort in Demand Response Solutions for Water Heaters: User-Centric Hot Water Management. In: Helfert, M., Klein, C., Donnellan, B., Gusikhin, O. (eds) Smart Cities, Green Technologies, and Intelligent Transport Systems. VEHITS SMARTGREENS 2016 2016. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 738. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63712-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63712-9_3

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