A multipurpose test rig for district heating substations: domestic hot water preparation and keep-warm function comparison

¹ VITO NV, Energy Technology Unit, Thermal Energy Systems Group, Boeretang 200, BE-2400, Mol, Belgium
² KU Leuven (University of Leuven), Celestijnenlaan 300 - Box 2421, B-3001, Leuven, Belgium
³ EnergyVille, Thor Park 8300, 3600, Genk, Belgium

^* Corresponding author: jad.alkoussa@vito.be

Abstract

A well performing District Heating Substation (DHS) is crucial for the efficiency of the District Heating (DH), especially with the shift towards low temperature 4^th generation DH systems. For this reason, testing and characterization of commercially available DHSs becomes important to estimate their effect on the DH network. Within the thermo-technical laboratory of EnergyVille, a multipurpose test rig has been built for testing DHSs. In this setup, different DH conditions and heat demand profiles for space heating and for Domestic Hot Water (DHW) can be emulated. Independent tests have been performed on 4 DHSs from three different manufacturers, focused on the DHW preparation for low DH supply temperature and on the stand-by/keep-warm operation of the substations. The latter maintains a certain temperature within the heat exchanger to avoid delays in the delivery of DHW. The results showed that improvements are needed on DHW production for lower DH supply temperatures. Also, enhancements are needed to reduce losses from the keep-warm function. Given that DH systems can have thousands of substations, this will reduce the overall losses and improve the performance of the DH network.