Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Performance Comparison Of Control Methods For Tankless Water Heaters, David P. Yuill, Andrew H. Coward, Gregor P. Henze

David Yuill

Tankless water heaters (TWH) have several advantages and disadvantages when compared with storage water heaters. One disadvantage is that the outlet temperature of the water is difficult to control. To address this problem, the authors apply seven different control approaches and con- duct experiments to test the effectiveness of each approach. The experiments are carried out on a commercially available electric TWH, using a test method and apparatus developed by the authors. The seven approaches include various configurations of feedback or feed-forward con- trol, or both. One fairly simple approach devised in this project combines feedback and feed-forward control. This …