Home▸Energy & Thermodynamics▸District Heating Network: Sharing Waste Heat Between Buildings

♨️ District Heating Network

Toggle data centres, supermarkets and a wastewater plant onto a district heating pipe loop that shares their waste heat with homes, offices and a school, and watch the live fuel-savings comparison against every building heating itself standalone.

Energy & Thermodynamics3DModerate60 FPS

A six-plot city block where you decide which buildings sit where — waste-heat sources like a data centre, a supermarket and a wastewater plant on one side, heat-hungry homes, offices and a school on the other — all tied together by an underground district-heating pipe loop.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

How much waste heat a network actually recovers depends on matching supply to demand: recovered heat can never exceed whichever is smaller, the waste heat generated or the heat requested, so the comparison against a "no network" baseline shows the real fuel savings.

🎮 How to Use

Assign a building to each of the six plots, adjust winter demand severity, and flip the network switch on and off to compare live fuel-consumption readouts with and without heat sharing.

💡 Did You Know?

A supermarket's refrigeration system rejects heat all year round — pairing it with a nearby swimming pool or apartment block through a heat network can cut both the supermarket's cooling bill and its neighbour's heating bill at the same time.

⚙ Under the hood

Toggle waste-heat sources — a data center, a supermarket, a wastewater treatment plant — onto a six-plot city block district heating pipe loop that shares their heat with heat-hungry homes, offices and a school, and watch a live network-wide comparison of fuel needed with the network sharing heat versus every building heating itself standalone.

District HeatingWaste Heat RecoveryUrban EnergyEnergy EfficiencyHeat NetworkSustainable CitiesThree.js

3D · Three.js / WebGL renderer · 60 FPS target · runs fully client-side, no install