Energy exchange between earth-sheltered structures and the surrounding ground

A program of measurements is underway at Williamson Hall, an earth-sheltered building on the campus of the University of Minnesota. The temperature and the moisture field in the ground adjacent to the building, as well as the heat flux through the building walls, are measured continuously and recorded on magnetic tape and are thus available for evaluation. The thermal conductivities of soil samples at various moisture contents were measured with a novel, unsteady method. Temperature fields in the soil adjacent to the building were also calculated on an electronic computer using the unsteady heat-conduction equation. The paper describes the present status of this study and presents samples of the results obtained to date.