Total thermal resistance of ground heat exchanger (GHE) is comprised of that of the soil and inside the borehole. The thermal resistance of soil can be calculated using the linear source theory and cylindrical source theory, while that inside the borehole is more complicated due to the...

Ground source heat pump system takes advantage of the stable ground temperature to achieve energy savings and to reduce CO2 emission. However, the system has several barriers for the wider application such as high installation costs, incompletion of design standard and lack of recognition as...

This paper presents a numerical heat transfer model for vertical U-tube Ground Heat Exchangers (GHE). This model is uniquely able to take into to account different initial soil temperatures and physical properties at different depths. The model has been validated based on an experimental case...

Computer simulation of borehole ground heat exchangers used in geothermal heat pump systems was conducted using three-dimensional implicit finite difference method with rectangular coordinate system. Each borehole was approximated by a square column circumscribed by the borehole radius. Borehole...

Hourly energy simulations are an important part of the design and analysis of ground-source heat pump systems. In order to evaluate the fluid temperature in the borehole of a geothermal heat pump system, most of the current models express the heat transfer rate as a sum of step changes in heat...

An improvement to the thermal resistance capacity model (TRCM) used to model borehole heat exchangers is presented. Here, the original model is extended to integrate the thermal capacities of the heat carrier fluid and pipe and to better account for the spacing between the pipes. Model results...

The effective thermal conductivity of six vertical closed-loop ground heat exchangers (GHEXs), which were installed in a test bed located in Wonju, South Korea, has been experimentally evaluated by performing in-situ thermal response tests (TRTs). To compare the thermal efficiency of the GHEXs...

Over the years several methods have been proposed to simulate and design the earth heat exchanger for a ground-source heat pump (GSHP) system. Some of these methods are based on numerical techniques while others rely on analytic solutions. Among the latter, two classical solutions have been...

The Kelvin line-source equation, used to analyze thermal response tests, describes conductive heat transfer in a homogeneous medium with a constant temperature at infinite boundaries. The equation is based on assumptions that are valid for most ground-coupled heat pump environments with the...

Because of poor heat transfer coefficients of soil/rock, ground source heat pumps (GSHP) or underground thermal energy storage (UTES) systems always occupy a large area and need many ground heat exchangers. This initial energy investment is so heavy that it cannot be used on a large-scale....