Master's lecture in Mechanical Engineering -  Aleksander Stefan Ernest Lelièvre

Master's student: Aleksander Stefan Ernest Lelièvre

Title: Heat Storage for Load Balancing District Heating Demand in the Westmanislands

 ___________________________________________

Faculty: Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science

Advisors:  Halldór Pálsson, Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science and Ari Ólafsson, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Physical Sciences

Examiner: Heimir Hjartarson, Mechanical Engineer at Efla

Abstract

Thermal storage can be a useful tool in balancing load and demand in district heating systems, resulting in reduced operational costs. In light of the restructuring of the district heating system on the Westmanislands it was found that a potential might exist for the setup of a thermal storage unit. The project was to model that district heating system and find an optimal storage size to minimise the district heating operational costs. The results showed that the operational costs could be reduced significantly with the installation of a thermal storage. An exact value was difficult to find as it was found that the power outages on the island due to the district heating system running on uncertain electricity had a large impact on the optimisation. A statistical approach was taken to compare the results to a set of 100 different outage scenarios. It was found that the results had a low chance of delivering a solution that was oversized as they were in the lower third of the results. This was seen as a positive result as it is expected that the number and size of outages is will be reduced thanks to the installation of a heat pump on the Westmanislands.