Browsing by Author "Van der Merwe, A. B."

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    A computationally inexpensive energy model for horizontal electric water heaters with scheduling
    (2016-03) Nel, P. J. C.; Booysen, M. J.; Van der Merwe, A. B.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Electric water heaters (EWHs) remain one of the main contributors to energy consumption in countries where they are used. EWH models serve as a step towards achieving optimised control, and can also be used to inform users of expected savings due to changes, if the model is energy-based. Various models have been proposed, but none of them include more than half of the six key features that the model presented in this paper supports: horizontal orientation; schedule control; low computational complexity; validation of the model; multinodal stratification; and multinodal standing losses. The presented model is validated against six datasets: four comprising 900 hours with multiple water usage events; and two with only standing losses. The results show that the model estimates energy consumption over ten days including usage with an error of less than 2% and 5% for schedule control and thermostat control respectively. The simulation model is simple enough to execute ten days of simulation in less than 100 milliseconds on a standard desktop machine, 150 times faster than a prominent model from literature, making it also suitable for large scale simulations or for use on mobile devices.