The Ohio State University is a large, public university whose main campus in Columbus, Ohio, United States includes academic, laboratory, research, dormitory, and office buildings, as well as athletic facilities and a large full-service research and hospitals. The hospital as well as associated academic and medical research buildings are located on the south side of campus. A large chiller plant, built in 2011, supplies chilled water to buildings in the area via a system of both direct-bury piping and utility tunnels. When analyzed holistically, these buildings showed a high opportunity for heat recovery, with a base load of more than 900 tons of chilled water usage in winter and around 10,000 tons of peak demand in summer. On the heating side, winter peaks were around 50,000 MBH and summer base load is near 10,000 MBH. Previously, steam was being converted to hot water in each building. With a centralized heating system, savings can be achieved by recovering the heat that was being rejected by the existing chillers to the environment through cooling towers. Now, this energy is used to heat water which is supplied to the buildings by a new district heating hot water network (HHW). A very efficient high temperature and high-capacity Heat-Recovery Chiller (HRC) is used to generate both HHW and CHW while producing energy savings.
