Thermal Stratification and Temperature Variation in Horizontal Electric Water Heaters: A Characterisation Platform

Electric water heaters, which have the capacity to act as thermal energy storage, are well suited demand management strategies in smart grid applications. However, finding balance between managing power load, reducing losses, user’s convenience, and bacterial growth control, requires accurate modelling of internal dynamics tank, including stratification. As a black box, this unknown is dependent on multitude environmental factors (e.g., ambient temperature inlet temperature), draw patterns, scheduling, set temperatures orientation vessel. The latter affects stratification variation inside therefore has direct bearing balancing management. Although been assessed vertically oriented tanks, what happens horizontal variety—ubiquitous developing countries—is currently left guesswork. In paper, we present development an embedded hardware software platform with variations heater can be characterised under numerous usage conditions. importance doing so highlighted by preliminary results, clearly show expected substantial along vertical axis, but also interesting phenomena longitudinal transverse axes, for both static (no draw) dynamic (with We conclude highlighting potential further research.