Matthis Thorade
Matthis Thorade has been using Modelica for modeling of thermofluid systems since 2008, focusing on fluid properties, heat exchangers, vapor compression cycles and robust numerics. Since 2018 he works at Modelon as a simulation engineer, contributing to the development of the Modelon commercial libraries.
Session
Cyclic frosting and defrosting operations constitute a common characteristic of air-source heat pumps in cold climates during winter. Simulation models that can capture simultaneous heat and mass transfer phenomena associated with frost/defrost behaviors and their impact on the overall heat pump system performance are of critical importance to improved controls of heat delivery and frost mitigation. This paper presents a novel frost formulation using an enthalpy method to systematically capture all phase-change behaviors including frost formation and melting, retained water refreezing and melting, and water drainage during cyclic frosting and defrosting operations. A Fuzzy modeling approach is proposed to smoothly switch source terms when evaluating the dynamics of frost and water mediums for numerical robustness. The proposed frost/defrost model is incorporated into a flat-tube outdoor heat exchanger model of an automotive heat pump system model to investigate system responses under cyclic operations of frosting and reverse-cycle defrosting.