Intermittent heating with rapid response and efficient operation: A heat pump solution for integrated convective and radiant heating

Intermittent heating offers promising potential for reducing building energy consumption but faces a performance trade-off: convective terminals offer rapid response at the expense of thermal comfort and energy efficiency, while radiant terminals provide superior comfort and energy performance but are incompatible with intermittent operation. Therefore, this study proposes a heat pump system capable of generating hot air for convective heating and hot water for radiant heating. The hot water circuit is coupled with the inner pipe of a double-layer pipe-embedded wall, whose outer pipe utilizes shallow geothermal energy to reduce heat loss through the building envelope. A residential case study in Shanghai is conducted through TRNSYS–MATLAB co-simulation. The results show that an intermittent heating strategy combining convective heating for rapid response and radiant heating for efficient stable operation achieves 17% energy savings over continuous heating. Compared to a conventional radiant floor heating system, the proposed system improves the heat pump's heating seasonal performance factor by 14% and reduces electricity consumption by 30% while maintaining thermal comfort. Additionally, the proposed system achieves a 9% lower life cycle cost with a dynamic payback period of 3.7 years. This work provides a promising solution combining thermal comfort and energy efficiency for intermittent heating.