CASE HISTORY – Fiorini arrives at the Portonovi tourist resort in Montenegro

In October 2018, Fiorini Industries partnered with the Forlì-based engineering company, ELTEC, to implement the district heating and conditioning network of the Portonovi resort in Montenegro.

A thermal exchange system with sea water was required to produce heat transfer fluid. The use of systems like this guarantees excellent energy performance which is essential for a structure covering over 25 hectares.

An ambitious project which required our partner to study the different variables to determine the best possible characteristics for the system. Based on the estimates for energy demand, a cooling power of 8.690 kW and a heating power of 10.588 kW was assumed, while the calculations showed that heating the swimming pools in the summer was one of the key energy consumption areas.

It is here in particular that the professional approach of the Fiorini design team came into play, by creating a bespoke series of eight exchangers, resistant to seawater corrosion, to be connected to the heat pump system. The result was a high-performance system that could simultaneously produce hot and cold water, without wasting electricity while heating in the summer period.

ELTEC, therefore, installed seven heat pumps, which take sea water from a depth of 18 metres (to avoid any possible influence of external factors) and transport it to the power plant via 2 parallel DN 1000 fiberglass pipes.

Once collected, the sea water is purified by disc filters and conveyed to the large Fiorini plate heat exchangers: eight “giants” (seven always operational and one in reserve) weighing 2.5 tonnes each, with the task of transforming the softened water into the heat transfer fluid used in the district heating network.

Transporting the system (20 tonnes of Fiorini technology) by sea posed a real challenge, but now, with the exchangers in place and operating at full capacity, one that has been overcome.