Background. A large part of the heat lost when thermal energy is transported through the heating system is made up by convection and radiation losses through thermal isolation of pipelines. According to the Federal State Statistics Service, heat losses of the heat supply systems account for 8,5–16 % of the energy supplied to the system. R.A. Ilyin’s, V.M. Fokin’s and A.S. Skripchenko’s works describe the ways of reducing heat losses by applying technical solutions aimed at better heat insulation and waterproofing of heat supply systems. However, the problem of heat loss recovery has not been considered. The timeliness of the present experimental study is associated with the need to determine the share of the actual heat losses that should be utilized to ensure constant parameters of the heat carrier in the heating system.
Materials and methods. The research has been done on a patented «device for heat loss recovery in the heating duct» that consists of a collector receiving the thermal losses from the pipelines of a thermal network and a heat pump, raising the potential of the «accumulated» thermal energy to the required parameters. An experimental installation has been created allowing the study of heat power transfer processes within a heating system. During the experiment, we recorded the values of the heat flow for three different configurations of the installation. The obtained results of the experimental study were processed by the method of mathematical statistics.
Results. The present article proposes a variant of increasing the overall performance of thermal networks, by applying patented «Devices for heat loss recovery in the heating duct». For the first time, we have experimentally determined the share of heat losses which can be recovered in the proposed original device, not affecting the thermal operating mode of the heat supply network.
Conclusions. The share of heat losses that can be recovered in the proposed device has been found to be equal to a half of the actual heat losses in a heat supply network. The obtained results allow determining the amount of thermal energy that can be utilized in a «Device for heat loss recovery in the heating duct» as part of energy-saving measures enhancing the operation efficiency of heating networks with different pipeline diameters.