Evaluation of ice rink floor performance and heat load

• Author(s): Santos, Daniel Alexandre Marques dos
• Date: 2013
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/9646
• Origin: Repositório da Universidade de Lisboa
• Subject(s): Ice rink; Refrigeration system; Ice rink slab; Heat transfer; Thermal inertia; Teses de mestrado - 2013
• Document Type: Master Thesis
• Language: English
• Advisor(s): Rogstam, Jorgen; Panão, Marta João Nunes Oliveira

Description

Tese de mestrado integrado em Engenharia da Energia e do Ambiente, apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa, através da Faculdade de Ciências, 2013 In Sweden, ice rinks are one of the largest energy consumers in the public building sector, requiring, each ice rink, about 1000 MWh/year, from which approximately 43% is used by the refrigeration system. The first challenge in the work was to find the cooling capacity of the refrigeration system for two ice rinks, Älta and Järfälla, considering that the cooling capacity is approximately the sum of the total heat load on the ice and the losses in the distribution system. This estimative was achieved using data from a Performance Analyser called ClimaCheck. Furthermore, aiming at decreasing the ice rink high energy consumption, two approaches are studied: i) evaluating the heat transfer of the slab and ii) its thermal inertia. To do so new designs of ice rink slabs have been proposed and modelled to conclude which benefits can therefore be achieved. A practical case shows that replacing the standart type of concrete with one more conductive will enable energy savings around 9400 kWh/year. Although sometimes the results from the models only make sense if there is a previous known background from the studied ice rinks, like the type of concrete used in the slab, the obtained results show good evidence that the models can successfully be used to evaluate both heat conduction and thermal inertia of an ice rink floor. Further developments in the area, such as a creation of a dynamic model instead of the used static one, will contribute to the achievement of more accurate results regarding the energy saving potential, fact that would provide useful information when retrofitting or building a new ice slab.