Study of a district heating system in Akureyri, Iceland

Abstract

Design of geothermal district heating system is based on theoretical analysis and practical calculations. The actual district heating system in Akureyri city was used as an example to analyze and calculate a geothermal district heating system and to present analysis and calculation results in this report. This analysis shows too high pressure loss in some pipes. The reason for this is not wrong design of the system, but that here the Icelandic Standard for building heat loss calculations was used for estimating the pipe flow rates. This pipe flow rates are considerably high than what is experienced in the real situation. Studies are made on the effect of radiator size on the water consumption. They indicate that total yearly water consumption can be reduced by increasing the radiator area. Two kinds of radiator area increases were calculated, which is 16% and 42% respectively. They gave 4% and 17% water consumption reduction respectively. The most important target for this report is to get a understanding of the main factor involved in the design process of geothermal district heating system.