Piping Network Design for IZTECH Campus Geothermal District Heating System, Izmir Turkey

Abstract

Izmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH), founded in 1992, has a geothermal resource at the border of the Campus with a temperature of 33?C. At present, the Campus is still under development and each faculty building has an individual fuel-fired boiler heating system.
The district heating system design consists of two parts; heating system design and piping network design. In this study, piping network design of Izmir Institute of Technology (IZTECH) Campus is given in detail. Heating system design is given in another paper (Yildirim et al., 2005).
Piping network design consists of material selection, determination of target pressure loss (TPL), heat centre location, piping installation type and economy of the system. The piping network of the campus has been considered with two loops, one as "geothermal loop" and the other as "campus loop". Each loop contains supply and return mains. To design the optimum network for the campus, various design alternatives are studied for various heat centre location and installation type. Using Pipelab software, the optimum diameter of each pipe used in the network is calculated. The total length of considered network of the district heating system is 9,486 m. The heat centre is located almost in the middle of the campus. Underground (buried) pipeline installation is preferred. While carbon steel pipes are installed for the campus loop, composite (FRP) pipes are installed for the geothermal loop.