Home▸Energy & Thermodynamics▸Mining the City for Warmth: Waste-Heat Recovery for District Heating

♨️ Mining the City for Warmth

How cities capture low-grade waste heat from metro tunnels, data centres, and industry, and route it through heat pumps and fifth-generation district heating networks to displace fossil fuel for heating.

Energy & Thermodynamics3DAdvanced60 FPS🌍 Earth

A cutaway city block where waste heat from a metro tunnel, a data centre, and an industrial plant is drawn into a central heat pump and pumped out through a district heating network to warm surface buildings.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

Low-grade heat sources feed a heat pump that lifts them to a useful supply temperature; the heat pump's coefficient of performance (COP) sets how much electricity that lift costs, and the network's operating temperature sets how much fossil heating it can displace.

🎮 How to Use

Pick which waste-heat sources are connected, adjust the heat pump's COP and building demand, and switch between a low-temperature 5th-generation network and a hot legacy network. Watch the flow particles, radiator glow colour, and live stats respond.

💡 Did You Know?

Because 5th-generation networks run only a few degrees above ground temperature, pipe heat losses are minimal and the heat pump does far less "lifting" work than in a legacy 80°C network — often doubling the effective COP.

⚙ Under the hood

Heat PumpsDistrict HeatingWaste Heat RecoveryRenewable EnergyEnergy EfficiencyThermal SystemsThree.js

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