| Title | A Concept of Making Use of Closed Underground Workings for Heat Recovery in Historical 'Wieliczka' Salt Mine (UNESCO) |
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| Authors | Andrzej GONET, Stanislaw STRYCZEK, Aneta SAPINSKA-SLIWA, Krzysztof BRUDNIK, Tomasz SLIWA |
| Year | 2015 |
| Conference | World Geothermal Congress |
| Keywords | Salt mine, geoenergetics, closed loop, geothermal source heat pump, mining heat |
| Abstract | A concept of exploiting heat from old workings to be closed in the 'Wieliczka' Salt Mine is described in the paper. The monumental salt mine has been uninterruptedly operational since the 13th century. At present this is predominantly a museum of mining industry visited by over a million tourists from all over the world each year. The 'Wieliczka' Salt Mine has been put on the first UNESCO World Heritage List of 1978. The operations performed in the mine are related with maintaining historical workings, Tourist Route and extreme Miner's Route. Apart from this an underground sanatorium was made for curing various diseases, mainly allergies. Part of over 200 km long workings and saline domes was liquidated to maintain the monumental part of the mine. Therefore a concept was proposed, according to which in part of the old workings, prior to their liquidation and backfilling, heat reception systems should be built. Thus obtained heat could be used by the underground sanatorium, e.g. for heating up saline water for balneological purposes and by the underground restaurant. A concept of heat reception from lower levels in the mine to be used on the upper levels is presented in the paper. In this way an underground heat transformer can be put to use instead of taking part of energy from the mine's surface. Experience gathered while realizing this project could be used for other tourist-managed monumental mine objects and also for working mines. |