A heat pump/thermal energy storage system utilising clathrate as a storage medium has been constructed to evaluate system performance in simulated heating and cooling cycles. The system utilises a common thermal energy storage system for both cooling and heating and operates with direct-contact heat transfer between refrigerant and water or clathrate. Experimental runs have been performed utilising basic Refrigerant-12 clathrate for both the cooling and heating systems. Algorithms have been implemented to provide energy balances and to compute the system's overall coefficient of performance (COP) for every run. The experimental results demonstrate the system's feasibility and potential to perform as a thermal energy storage heat pump system.

KEYWORDS: cooling, heating, energy storage, R12, refrigerants, heat pumps, calculating, coefficient of performance, heat flow, algorithms, heat balance, experiment