Validate - 2025

Building description: The building CARTIF III consist of 3.100 m2 corresponding to six industrial premises and 935 m2 corresponding to offices. The building is dedicated mainly to host research and experimentation projects related to the activity of CAR. The building has a cellar, ground and first floor showing a distribution similar to a letter “E”. The ThumbsUp installation will be placed in the research part of the building.

Heating & Cooling system: The main thermal energy source for air conditioning the offices is the geothermal water-to-water heat pump, 101.5 kW heating and 77 kW cooling nominal power. It is equipped with a power regulation system to adapt the thermal generation to the load of the building. Also passive heating and cooling through boreholes is foreseen (15 double-U-shaped polyethylene HEX 100 m depth). PV rooftop with 45 kWp. Radiant floor H&C and Air Handling Units (AHUs) are employed as distribution system. The heat pump is connected also to an inertial sensible storage (1.5 m3) to enhance the flexibility operation both in heating and cooling season. The peak heating load is 95 kW and the peak loading 65 kW. Furthermore, a centralized large PCM cold storage (100 kWh, 11.8 °C melting temperature) already available at CAR premise, will be connected for the validation activity, also to benchmark cold storage performances with ThumbsUp proposed materials.

• Hardware: A dedicated section of the building will be interested by the ThumbsUp validation activity, according to the capacity installed. A complete ThumbsUp configuration will be validated, to support the future demonstration phase. The installation will comprise: sorTES with a target capacity of 20 kWh, to support heating and cooling provision, charged by PtH solution exploiting PV rooftop and electricity from the grid. One centralized FractLES for heating/DHW with a target capacity of 14 kWh and again one distributed at floor level for heating/DHW with a target capacity of 9 kWh. Both will be connected to the heat pump as well as exploiting their integrated PtH solution. The innovative BEMS by ALGOW will be integrated as well for this part of the facility. This BEMS will consider additional variables such as weather and electrical power price forecasts to optimize the use of the TES of the building. The BEMS may be able to consider model-based (digital twin) control of the whole building. Summarizing, the integration of the TES in the existing facility will be done in a way to allow most possible different configurations to maximise the knowledge extracted from the test to be carried out.
• Software: the WECoMP thermo-economic tool will be applied in the design phase of the validation and the GSY tool will be used to investigate the impact of the ThumbsUp solution on the electricity grid.