Speaker
Description
The use of remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) – drones – over the past decade has led to a massive increase in both data acquisition and applications for thermal systems. The thermal sensors in many RPAS are of sufficient quality that quantitative information can be extracted with some measure of confidence. In this work we present quantitative results of a 6-year thermographic imaging study of district heating systems (DHS) in Canada at Canadian Forces Bases – Gagetown, Kingston, Petawawa, Cold Lake, Comox and Bagotville. In general, DHS are linear thermal sources that are up to 10’s of km’s in length. As it is the primary heating infrastructure of large-scale campuses, DHS also radiate a significant amount of energy as heat in-between buildings which becomes lost to the environment. The in-between building’s portion of the DHS is the focus of this study. Our methodology relies on acquiring not only RPAS thermographic imagery, but also supporting ground data during the time of the RPAS data collection as well as ensuring the reliability and validation of the thermal sensor. With considerations of various emissive materials over the DHS (soil, asphalt, gravel, concrete, etc) and environmental conditions (air temperature, ground temperature, humidity, wind speed, etc) we processed the thermographic RPAS imagery to provide a quantifiable energy loss value for the entire DHS within a georeferenced system.
The thermal output results from individual heat loss sections within the DHS studied vary from ~ 100 W/m to over 500 W/m with the average energy loss over the 6 sites being 189.4 W/m with a standard deviation of 23.9 W/m and a standard error of the mean of 9.75 W/m. In-situ validation of the RPAS thermographic results were obtained by a 3rd party using traditional heating system heat loss measurements and agree to within 7%. As the entire length of each DHS is known well, we are able to estimate the entire energy loss. The total annual energy loss of all 6 locations amounts to 327.5TJ, which is equivalent to the entire energy budget of ~ 3700 average Canadian homes.
