Small Smart Sustainable Systems for future Domestic Hot Water (4S-DHW)

Professor Bob Critoph and Dr Stan Shire have been awarded an EPSRC grant of £1.5M to tackle the issue of compact, energy-efficient solutions for the supply of domestic hot water. The Warwick team are partnered on the project by experts in the field from the Universities of Ulster and Loughborough, as well as three major companies; Spirax Sarco Ltd, Baxi, and Emerson Climate Technologies.

New dwellings are no longer built to include a large hot water tank, with the preference being for smaller combination boilers. Current heat pump technology, which is more energy efficient than the current solutions, is too large to take the place of ‘combi’ boilers, as well as lacking the facility for ‘instant’ hot water which consumers expect. The team intend to develop a suite of heat pump/storage/control technologies, using either electricity or gas that function without conventional storage cylinders and can deliver energy efficient affordable hot water to a wide range of dwellings well into the future.

Warwick’s main contribution will be in gas fired heat pump solutions, Ulster’s in electric heat pumps and Loughborough in smart compact thermal stores using Phase Change Materials (PCMs). An electric heat pump system with integrated smart store and controls will be demonstrated in Ulster’s test houses and a gas-based system tested at Warwick.

Prof. Critoph is Director of i-STUTE (interdisciplinary centre for Storage, Transformation and Upgrading of Thermal Energy, a £5M project funded by RCUK). He has been appointed by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) to represent the UK on the International Energy Agency Heat Pump Annex 43 ‘Thermally driven heat pumps’ and is author of three DECC reports on gas heat pumps. He previously ran the EPSRC ‘Thermal Energy Conversion, Conservation and Storage’ network linking the UK, China and Japan. He has worked on heat pump and refrigeration systems since 1982, published over 100 papers (h-index of 18), 2 book chapters, 5 patents and managed contracts worth £9M for industry, government and the EU.

Dr Shire is Associate Professor of Sustainable Energy Systems. He currently has two EPSRC funded research projects worth over £1.6M (EP/M008088/1 and EP/K009915/1) and has worked with industry on DEFRA funded research projects and industrially funded consultancy. Recently he has been the academic lead on 2 DECC funded SBRI projects on heat networks and advanced thermal storage (for domestic heat pumps). In 2014 he gave an invited plenary at the World Renewable Energy Congress.