Enhanced analysis of primary temperature influence on 5th generation District Heating and Cooling network performances

Fifth generation district heating and cooling networks (5GDHC) will most certainly play a role in thereduction of CO2 emissions and the resilience to global warming. The analysis of the literature showsa lack of exhaustiveness of past studies on the key physical phenomena involved in 5GDHC networks.This paper presents a novel simulation solution taking into account the decentralized thermodynamicmachines performance variability, the thermal coupling between the pipes and the ground and thethermofluidic phenomena in the network. The simulationsolution is composed of three submodels: a substation model, a network model, anda ground model. The relevance of the model is underlined thanks to a case study composed of 10prosumers and a balancing plant. It was shown that considering a constant coefficient of performanceat substations and fixed ground temperatures led respectively to 4.4% and 18.7% errors on the dailyenergy of the balancing plant. Using the same case study, the influence of the temperature setpoints atthe balancing plant exit were analyzed. The results stress that a seasonalstrategy with 2 modes (winter and summer) is the most interesting with an 18.8% reduction in overallconsumption with respect to a classical state-of-the art free-floating strategy.