TY - JOUR
T1 - A topology optimization framework to facilitate adoption of advanced district thermal energy systems
AU - Allen, Amy
AU - Henze, Gregor
AU - Baker, Kyri
AU - Pavlak, Gregory
AU - Long, Nicholas
AU - Fu, Yangyang
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. Funding provided by the Building Technologies Office and the Advanced Manufacturing Office. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Institute of Physics Publishing. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/11/20
Y1 - 2020/11/20
N2 - Advanced district thermal energy systems, which circulate water at temperatures near ambient conditions, and facilitate the utilization of waste heat and renewable thermal sources, can lower the carbon-intensity of urban districts, advancing the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Optimization of the network topology - the selection of the best subset of buildings and the best network to connect them, to minimize life cycle cost - can increase adoption of these system in appropriate applications. The potential “solution space” of the topology optimization problem grows factorially with the number of buildings in the district, motivating the consideration of a design heuristic. In this study, a heuristic for the network selection was evaluated with an exhaustive search, for a prototypical four-building district. For the prototypical district considered, the heuristic was effective in selecting an optimal network topology. Additionally, it was found that, in this case, the selection of the subset of buildings was more influential on the life cycle cost than the selection of the network topology. This work is part of a larger effort to develop a topology optimization framework for district thermal energy systems, which is anticipated to address barriers to adoption of ambient-temperature systems.
AB - Advanced district thermal energy systems, which circulate water at temperatures near ambient conditions, and facilitate the utilization of waste heat and renewable thermal sources, can lower the carbon-intensity of urban districts, advancing the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Optimization of the network topology - the selection of the best subset of buildings and the best network to connect them, to minimize life cycle cost - can increase adoption of these system in appropriate applications. The potential “solution space” of the topology optimization problem grows factorially with the number of buildings in the district, motivating the consideration of a design heuristic. In this study, a heuristic for the network selection was evaluated with an exhaustive search, for a prototypical four-building district. For the prototypical district considered, the heuristic was effective in selecting an optimal network topology. Additionally, it was found that, in this case, the selection of the subset of buildings was more influential on the life cycle cost than the selection of the network topology. This work is part of a larger effort to develop a topology optimization framework for district thermal energy systems, which is anticipated to address barriers to adoption of ambient-temperature systems.
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U2 - 10.1088/1755-1315/588/2/022054
DO - 10.1088/1755-1315/588/2/022054
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85097157236
VL - 588
JO - IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science
JF - IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science
SN - 1755-1307
IS - 2
M1 - 022054
T2 - World Sustainable Built Environment - Beyond 2020, WSBE 2020
Y2 - 2 November 2020 through 4 November 2020
ER -