Analisis Ciclo De Vida

Energy and Buildings 48 (2012) 168–174

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Energy and Buildings
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enbuild

Assessment for central heating systems with different heat sources: A case study
Chen Chengmin ∗ , Zhang Yufeng, Ma Lijun
Room B-509, Building 24, School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, WeijinRoad 92, Tianjin City, PR China

article

info

Article history:
Received 18 October 2011
Received in revised form
23 December 2011
Accepted 20 January 2012
Keywords:
Central heating system
Environmental impact
Eco-efficiency analysis
Waste heat utilization
Heat pump

abstract
This study puts forward to a comprehensive method to evaluate the environment impact and economic
benefitof central heating systems. Three types of residential heating systems are compared about the
energy use in one-year operation phase, including waste water heat pump system, coal boiler system
and gas boiler system.
The system, located in Tianjin City, China, is designed for residential buildings. The comparison is made
with respect to cost, environment impact and integrated assessment. Theresults indicate that according
to now power structure, if COP of the heat pump reaches 2.5 but lower than 3, heat pump system shows
better environment performance but wastes more money than boiler heating systems. If the COP of the
heat pump is above 3, heat pump heating system would have best integrated performance, i.e. it has
lower cost and less environmental impact than the other systems.
©2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Because of the increase of energy consumption and cost, to use
energy efficiently becomes more and more important. As known,
many industrial-heating processes, such as drying, wine industry, ceramics, etc., often generate a lot of waste heat [1]. At the
same time, the building energy consumption increases sharply.
Take China asexample, residential and commercial/institutional
buildings heating contribute to more than 22% of the secondary
energy in 2010 [2]. So recovery of waste heat for heating system
can save a lot of energy and bring huge economic benefit. In this
paper, the geothermal discharge water sources heat pump heating system and boiler heating system are compared on their cost,
environmental impact and thenintegrated impact.
Most papers published so far in the engineering domain have
focused on the heating system cost and environmental impact
respectively [3–6]. Sanner pointed out that ground source heat
pumps require more initial investment (about 30–50%) than the
air source heat pumps [7]. Brenn’s study showed that the efficiency
of heat pumps powered with electricity from the most modernnatural gas-fired combined cycle power plants is about twice that
of conventional boiler technologies [8], etc. However, little attention is focused on integrated analysis about cost and environment
impact (some of the environment impact analysis limited to the

Abbreviations: GW, global warming; NRC, non-renewable resource consumption; OD, ozone depletion; ACI, acidification; EUT, eutrophication;SPO, synthesis of
photochemical ozone; SW, solid waste; HW, hazardous waste; SD, smoke and dust.
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 15022020329; fax: +86 022 27890131.
E-mail address: ccm8668@163.com (C. Chengmin).
0378-7788/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.enbuild.2012.01.025

greenhouse gas emission), and the results are difficult to be comparedwith different heating systems of different buildings. A
possible reason for this may be that none of the literature incorporates an integrated approach. However, just environment impact
or cost analysis is not enough for the scenario choice sometime,
so in this paper, we propose an indicator, based on eco-efficiency
analysis, to evaluate the integrated impact of different heat sources.
The...