Master's Thesis: Data-Driven Identification and Prediction of Thermal Flexibility in Heat Pump Systems for Residential Buildings

Residential buildings with heat pumps can provide electrical flexibility by utilizing the thermal storage capacity present in buildings, domestic hot water tanks, and buffer storage. In this master's thesis, you will work on the automated estimation and prediction of the flexibility potential of heat pump systems in the residential sector. Building on existing concepts and methods, you will investigate how thermal properties and storage capacities can be identified from monitoring data and used to quantify the flexibility provided by a heat pump system.

• Analysis of existing approaches, evaluation of field data from monitoring systems, and definition of suitable data processing workflows
• Identification of key thermal parameters of buildings and storage systems and estimation of available flexibility over time
• Integration of developed models into a flexibility prediction workflow and evaluation of their performance using real measurement data
• Analysis of individual households as well as aggregated heat pump fleets, investigation of the influence of aggregation on the accuracy of flexibility estimation and prediction
• Extension and validation of an automated end-to-end workflow: data preprocessing and quality assessment, thermal system characterization, estimation of thermal storage capacity, flexibility estimation and prediction, analysis of individual systems and aggregated heat pump fleets
• Evaluation of the developed approach regarding accuracy, robustness, and practical applicability

• Education: Master's degree in Computer Science, Energy Engineering, Energy Technology or comparable with good academic performance
• Experience and know-how: proficient in Python; experience with databases; knowledge of heat pump systems is an advantage
• Personality and work style: reliable and curious personality with high self-motivation and willingness to quickly familiarize yourself with new topics
• Work routine: partial mobile work possible; on-site presence at least 60% (three days per week)
• Languages: fluent German and English in word and writing