Dynamic behavior of district heating systems

The goal of this study is to develop a simulation model of a hot water system taking into account the time dependent phenomena which are important for the operational management of such a system. A state of the art literature review has shown that there is no such model considering all parts from the generation of the heat at the plant to its consumption in the connected buildings so far. First, an exhaustive list of all dynamic phenomena occurring in district heating systems has been drawn and analyzed. Considering this list, this thesis proposes that a model which satisfies the criteria listed above can be developed by superposing four sub-models which are a dynamic model of the heat generation plant, a steady state model of the hydraulic calculation of the distribution network, a dynamic model of the thermal behavior of the network and a dynamic model of the heat consumers. The development of the four sub-models starts from the fundamental conservation equations for fluid systems, i.e. the conservation of mass, momentum and energy. The transformations of those general equations into simple calculation formulas show and justify the hypotheses made in the modeling process. The heat generation plant model itself is a set of sub-models: the models for steam boilers, hot water boilers and heat accumulators which take account of the dynamic evolution of the water temperature by a simple form of the energy conservation equation, as well as the steady state models for circulation pumps and pressurizers. Since the velocities in the network pipes are small, a consideration of steady states is adopted. A network model allowing to calculate the hydraulic variables in every point is adopted from the graph theory. The pressures and flow rates in the network are calculated at discrete time steps and they are considered to be constant for the duration between the time steps. (author) figs., tabs., refs