Techno-Economic and Environmental Performance of Two Distinct State-of-the-Art Solar-Assisted District Energy System Topologies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis introduces a novel, ambient-temperature district energy system topology that enables bi-directional mass flow to booster heat pumps and includes distributed solar-thermal generation. A detailed model of this system is developed in MATLAB-Simulink, and an equivalent model is developed for a conventional, supply-return district system. The systems are compared—with and without solar-thermal integration—in technical, environmental, and economic analyses. Annual simulations are conducted for the case study: a district energy system in Ottawa with 12 building clusters. The ambient system achieves an annual coefficient of performance of 1.40 without solar and 1.43 with solar. The conventional system achieves annual coefficients of performance of 1.26 and 1.28, respectively. The solar fractions of the ambient and conventional systems are 5.5 and 4.0% for heating and 9.3 and 10.0% for cooling, respectively. The ambient system (without solar) decreased annual carbon emissions by 32.16% relative to the conventional system, a significant improvement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".