In an indoor swimming pool, whether it is located in a hotel or resort, campsite, water park, shopping centre or any other leisure and/or tourism complex, it is crucial to ensure the comfort and safety of visitors, guests and users. To this end, one of the factors to consider is the temperature of the pool water. This must be adequate to maintain its quality and also for the specific leisure or sporting activity to which its design responds and which will take place in it.
The most commonly used system for water heating is the heat exchanger. These work on the principle of heat transfer by conduction. The system consists of two circuits: one for the pool water and one for a heat transfer fluid, such as hot water from a boiler, or a cooling gas from an air conditioning system.
The transfer of energy between the two circuits takes place in the heat exchanger, which consists of a contact surface between them, usually formed by tubes or plates. The heat transfer fluid from a boiler or similar system is circulated inside the heat exchanger. On contact with the surface of these tubes or plates, heat is transferred from the heat transfer fluid to the water in the indoor pool. A similar process is used to cool the water, but in this case a cooling fluid is used.
The heat exchange system of the indoor pool is defined and optimised during the design and calculation phase of the project for the hotel or resort, campsite, water park, shopping centre or leisure and tourism complex. This takes into account the size, the transfer surface, the operating temperatures of the primary and secondary circuit, as well as the flow rate and the pressure drop of the system.
Furthermore, in order to optimise the system, its design is carried out simultaneously with the other hydraulic, filtration and pumping systems of the indoor swimming pool. In any case, it is always advisable that the source generating heat or cold in the primary circuit be powered by renewable energies.
By Ángel Ibáñez Pérez, senior MEP engineer in the Architecture Department of Amusement Logic
