Feasibility study for ice-slurry to district cooling system in Korea

Abstract

The district-cooling system (DCS) was in service in Sangam in Seoul, Korea after 2005. The facility capacity of the DCS in Sang-am is 111Gcal/h at 2011 and 63Gcal/h of facility is planned to install till 2025. However, the cooling demand is increased due to new high-rise building blocks, and the required facility capacity is expected to be 101Gcal/h. A difficulty comes from building new plan in the existing plant. This paper is on the feasibility study for the new requirement under the restrictions of existing pipeline, limited space and regulation on the usage of electric driven chiller. Precise estimation of the diversity factor is essential to determine the required capacities. For this, every building in the area was categorized and the cooling loads were measured for the summer seasons of 2010 and 2011. The large energy capacity of ice slurry can potentially increase the cooling capacity in existing plants while maintaining the same flow rate and pumping power. Thus under the restriction of existing pipeline system, introducing ice slurry is expected as potential solution to the significantly increased cooling load without requiring increases in pipe size or system flow rates.