Exergy analysis and thermo-economic optimization of a district heating network with solar- photovoltaic and heat pumps

International audienceElectrification of district heating networks, especially using heat pumps, is widely recommended in literature. Installing heat pumps affects both electricity and heating networks. Due to lack of suitable modelling tools, size optimization of heat pumps in the heating network with the full consideration of the electric distribution network is not well addressed in literature. This paper presents an optimization of a district heating network consisting of solar photovoltaic and heat pumps with the consideration of the detail parameters of heating and electric distribution networks. An extended energy hub approach is used to model the energy system. Exergy and energy analyses are applied to identify and isolate lossy branches in a meshed heating network. Both methods resulted into the same reduced topology. Particle swarm optimization is then applied on the reduced topology in order to find out the most economical temperature profiles and size of distributed heat pumps. The thermo-economic results are found to be highly influenced by the heat demand distribution, the power loss in both electric and heat distribution network, the cost of generation, the temperature limits and the coupling effect of the heat pumps