Monitoring and control of a pilot plant made of solar assisted heat pump with hybrid panels

The plant in the Sport Palace "Carmine Romanzi" (Palacus, University of Genoa) consists of a Solar Assisted Heat Pump (SAHP) which integrates the two existing gas burners in the production of Domestic Hot Water (DHW) and Space Heating (SH). To manage the large number of control and measurement points along the installation, a data acquisition and control system has been introduced. Therefore, long inactivity periods have been recorded, due to the manual technicians' intervention: they turned the SAHP off since their knowledge of the plant was not sufficient to manage its problems. This issue shows a lack of "acceptance" both from the end user, who doesn't rely on the innovative plant, and from the technical staff, who doesn't encourage the employment of new technologies. A case study concerning the solar thermal field in integration of the DHW production is provided to evaluate qualitative indicators of acceptance and therefore illustrate a measurement of acceptance. The data collection system requires a further integration to record real time data to objectively quantify the level of acceptance according to coefficients depending on the end users' usage of the plant. A well performing data collection system and real time regulation criteria are the starting points to increase plant efficiency and reduce the need of active end users' intervention on it. An efficient and self-managed plant presents implicitly a very high level of acceptance as well.