Feasibility study on the low temperature district heating and cooling system with bi-lateral heat trades model

A Novel low temperature district heating and cooling system with auxiliary heat storage pipe system is proposed for reflecting new features of bi-lateral energy trades effectively in emerging energy prosumer based new energy business platform. The newly proposed district heating and cooling system can provide more favorable operating conditions to implement bi-lateral heat trades system between the heat supplier and the prosumers, who operating their own distributed energy generation unit such as a cogeneration etc., connected to the network being able to utilize low-exergy level of waste heats available in consumer side. In this study, the appropriate system configuration for reliable operation, the optimal operation rules, the functionality of auxiliary heat storage pipe on bi-lateral heat trades and its operating characteristics etc. are analyzed extensively by developing simplified simulation models of the DHC network using Matlab/Simulink without any support by experiment or field measurement. The simulation results show that the newly suggested low temperature DHC system with auxiliary heat storage pipe can add improved rooms of operating flexibility to maintain stable supplying temperature conditions and is superior to conventional system in handling bi-lateral heat trades model. It is also shown that the new concept of DHC system can alleviate the inefficiency arising from mismatching of heat demand and supply in consumer side significantly, not to mention of the heat losses during the operation. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.