Grand Tower Frankurt - Decentralised heating and cooling distribution for Germany's tallest residential building

The Grand Tower, being built in Frankfurt's district "Europaviertel", is distinguished above all by its impressive, dynamic architecture and exclusive living comfort. The groundbreaking project therefore received numerous prestigious awards in advance, such as the German Design Award and the International Property Award 2017. In fact, the residents of the 47-storey residential tower enjoy a lot. Highlights include a lobby with concierge service, a 1,000 m2 roof garden and a sun deck this is 145 m high. The 41 to 300 m2 apartments with their floor-to-ceiling glazing also offer an impressive view of Frankfurt and the Taunus mountains. The owners of the penthouses can also influence the design of the units during the construction phase.

The heating and cooling supply of the high-rise building also meets these high demands on flexibility and living comfort. The basis here is a district heating connection with a capacity of 1.5 MW and two chillers installed on the roof, each with a capacity of 550 kW. The dwelling stations serve as transfer points for warmth and cold to the living areas. They are supplied with heating and cooling water via the riser lines and, with the aid of integrated heat exchangers, ensure clear system separation and demand-oriented energy distribution to the individual consumers. On the lower floors, the residential units are equipped with underfloor temperature control and a bathroom radiator, and on the upper floors they are additionally equipped with a cooling ceiling and, if required, a fan coil.

The separation of the primary and secondary heating and cooling circuits brings a number of advantages to the residential tower. This allows the residents to adjust the room temperatures to their individual needs via the stations completely independently of the overall system, which significantly increases living comfort. The 6-way ball valve integrated in the decentralized solutions ensures that the consumers are reliably supplied with the required flow rate of hot or cold water at all times, both in heating and cooling mode.

In addition, by decoupling the residential units, the source of the fault can be identified relatively quickly in the event of a possible fault in the complex system. If this is located in the living area, the rest of the heating system remains fully operational during repair work. The stations also make it easy to retrofit a cooling ceiling or fan coil, as the necessary connections are already in place and the retrofit can be carried out without affecting the rest of the system.

At the same time, high pressures in the risers are required for reliable power distribution in the complex, which are reliably compensated by the dwelling stations. For this purpose, the manufacturer had extensive tests carried out with the tubes of the solutions in order to have them certified for nominal pressures up to PN 25. In addition, dynamic pressure closed-loop controllers are used to reduce the system pressure (PN 16) to the optimum level for the secondary circuits when it is transferred to the heating circuits.  

The exact adaptation of the dwelling stations to the high requirements of the building played a major role in the award of the contract. The project participants also received comprehensive advice and support from Uponor and KaMo. Added to this was the high flexibility in the production of the stations, of which ten units per week had to be delivered to the construction site at the beginning. The Grand Tower will be completed in 2020. 

An important part of the LINEAR software are the data sets of LINEAR industry partners. In this project, the participating companies Ventury and M&S Haustechnik benefited from the detailed data sets of Uponor panel heating systems and KaMo dwelling stations - both in the calculation and dimensioning, as well as in the construction. The data sets are regularly updated and checked and made available to all LINEAR users free of charge.