Scientific and technological progress and future perspectives of the solar assisted heat pump (SAHP) system

Among all available solar technologies, solar-assisted heat pump (SAHP) is the most popular technology for low- and medium-temperature applications, i.e., drying, space heating, water heating. This paper presents a critical review of SAHP, leading to identification key technological challenges with current SAHP technology, including (1) poor energy performance at low ambient temperatures; (2) difficulty in coupling thermal panels pumps achieve increased operational time reduced electrical usage; (3) mismatch between demand building supply system; (4) lack multi-functional modelling tool. A recently developed introduced, which can effectively tackle SAHPs, thus achieving enhanced efficiency, improved fast responsive buildings. The future research directions were identified: multi-source pump; defrosting capacity using waste renewable energy; advanced storage exchange unit (HSEU) technology; machine learning multi-objective evolutionary optimisation models prediction big datasets.