There are 2.5 million litres of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
If for some reason you wanted to bring it from a pleasant 20C to boiling point, German firm MAN Energy Solutions has a heat pump that could do it. And it would take less time than Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Hamlet.
“We can do this in less than four hours,” explains Raymond Decorvet, who works in business development at MAN Energy. “Or we could freeze the whole thing in about 11 hours.”
Theirs is among the largest heat pump units in the world. Heat pumps work by compressing gently warmed refrigerants to raise the temperature of these fluids. That heat can then be passed on to homes or industrial machinery.
Heat pumps require electricity to work but can produce around three or four kilowatts of heat for every kilowatt of power they consume, making them highly efficient. Plus, some designs can provide cooling as well.
Heat pumps are increasingly popular with some home owners but domestic devices are relatively small and tend to have outputs of several kilowatts or so. MAN Energy’s biggest commercial heat pump is thousands of times more powerful – with a total heating capacity of 48 megawatts (MW).
It can produce temperatures of up to 150C and heat thousands of homes, not just one. The company recently installed two of these machines in the port city of Esbjerg, in Denmark.
In this installation, the heat pumps’ CO2 refrigerant will absorb a small amount of heat from seawater. Compressors boost the temperature of the CO2 and the system can then transfer this heat, providing water of up to 90C to a district heating system serving 27,000 households.
Read from: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65321487
