I have acquired a thermal demand profile, in kW, required to maintain a fixed-set point temperature (21Deg) for an envelope. I would now like to be able to size and evaluate the effectiveness of various renewable thermal energy technologies to meet this demand. To achieve this, I set the temperature of an infinite sink equal to the set point of the envelope. The simulation then determines how much thermal power can be delivered to this sink based on the fluid dynamics in the system.
Decoupling the envelope and renewable systems considerably reduces the simulation time, which is the reason I am interested in this technique. I have not found any references that support this technique, therefore I would like to check the logic behind it. If anyone is aware of any references that detail how to decouple thermal demand and generation profiles, I'd be very interested to read them; otherwise I would be keen to know the shortcomings of my proposed methodology.
