• Land and Housing Review
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.25-32
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• 2018

Application of geothermal energy in buildings has been gaining popularity as it provides the benefits of both heating and cooling a building. Among the various types of geothermal energy systems, ground-coupled heat pump system is the most commonly applied one in South Korea. A ground heat exchanger plays an important role as a heat source in winter and a heat sink in summer. For the stable operation of a ground-coupled heat pump system, a ground heat exchanger should be sized so that it provides sufficient heating and cooling energy. Heating and cooling energies generated in ground heat exchangers mainly depend on the temperature difference between the heating medium in ground heat exchangers and the surrounding ground. In addition, the performance of ground heat exchangers influences the change in ground temperature. Therefore, it is necessary to consider this interrelation between the change in the ground temperature and the performance of ground heat exchanger for an accurate estimation of its performance. However, previous thermal analysis models for ground heat exchangers are not competent enough to allow a complete understanding of this interrelation. Therefore, this study proposes a three-dimensional equivalent, transient ground heat exchanger analysis model. First, a previous thermal analysis model for ground heat exchangers, including an analytical model, a g-function, and a numerical model are analyzed. Next, to overcome the limitations of the previous models, a three-dimensional equivalent, transient ground heat exchanger model is proposed. Finally, this study validated the proposed model with the measurement data of the thermal response test, sandbox test, and TRNSYS DST model. All validation results showed a good agreement. These findings helped us to investigate the thermal performance of ground heat exchangers more accurately than the analytical models, and faster than the numerical models. Furthermore, the proposed model contributes to the design of ground heat exchangers by considering the different operation conditions of buildings.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.24 no.6
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• pp.487-496
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• 2012

Recently, utilization of building foundations as ground-coupled heat exchangers has attracted much attention because they reduce the cost and enhance the heat transfer. The objective of this study is to evaluate the performance of energy-slab ground-coupled heat exchanger installed in a commercial building. In order to demonstrate the energy transfer characteristics of the energy-slab, experiments were conducted from October 2010 to September 2011. The 1-year measurement results showed that the mean EWTs of brine returning from the energy-slab were $9.6^{\circ}C$ in heating season and $24.9^{\circ}C$ in cooling season, which were in a range of design target temperatures. In addition, the geothermal heat pump system with the energy-slab showed on-off operation according to the setting temperatures of secondary fluid in water storage tank. The results also showed that the energy-slab extracted heat of 198.6 kW from the ground and injected heat of 318.9 kW to the ground, respectively.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.28 no.7
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• pp.293-298
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• 2016

A three-dimensional (3D) numerical model of the vertical ground-coupled heat exchanger is useful for analyzing the modern ground source heat pump system. Furthermore, a detailed description of the inner side of the exchanger allows to account for the effects of the thermal capacity. Thus, both methods are included in the proposed numerical model. For the ground portion, a FDM (Finite Difference Method) scheme has been applied using the Cartesian coordinate system. Cylindrical grids are applied for the borehole portion, and the U-tube configuration is adjusted at the grid, keeping the area and distance unchanged. Two sub-models are numerically coupled at each time-step using an iterative method for convergence. The model is validated by a reference 3D model under a continuous heat injection case. The results from a periodic heat injection input show that the proposed thermal capacity model reacts more slowly to the changes, resulting in lower borehole wall temperatures, when compared with a thermal resistance model. This implies that thermal capacity effects may be important factors for system controls.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.230-239
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• 2012

Ground-coupled heat pump (GCHP) systems utilize the immense renewable storage capacity of the ground as a heat source or sink to provide space heating, cooling, and domestic hot water. The main objective of the present study is to investigate the cooling and heating performance of a small scale GCHP system with horizontal ground heat exchanger (HGHE). In order to evaluate the performance, a water-to-air ground-source heat pump unit connected to a test room with a net floor area of 18.4 m2 and a volume of 64.4 m3 in the Korea Institute of Construction Technology ($37^{\circ}39'N$, $126^{\circ}48'E$) was designed and constructed. This GCHP system mainly consisted of slinky-type HGHE with a total length of 400 m, indoor heat pump, and measuring devices. The peak cooling and heating loads of the test room were 5.07 kW and 4.12 kW, respectively. The experimental results were obtained from March 15, 2011 to August 31, 2011 and the performance coefficients of the system were determined from the measured data. The overall seasonal performance factor (SPF) for cooling was 3.31 while the system delivered heating at a daily average performance coefficients of 2.82.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.11 no.3
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• pp.339-348
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• 1999

A computer model was developed in order to predict the temperature distribution and the performance of the vertical tube-in-tube ground coil heat exchanger. This model has been validated by experimental results conducted by ORNL. The heat exchanger performance with the variation of the length is calculated and compared. As results, the heat exchanger performance is proportional to the length but the performance per unit length decreases. The minimum performance of 70m - PVC heat exchanger during cyclic operation for a week is obtained 20,054kJ/h for cooling operation and 13,915kJ/h for heating operation. And minimum temperature difference is $4.64^{\circ}C$ for cooling operation and $2.64^{\circ}C$ for heating operation. In each case, it is noted that the temperature difference between the pipe and the far-field occurs within 0.8m from the heat exchanger.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.24 no.4
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• pp.351-357
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• 2012

To reduce the summertime cooling load of a plant factory, a concept design was performed for the double skin window which utilizes the low temperature air from a ground coupled heat exchanger. The design parameters were selected as the number of cavity air inlet, the cavity thickness, the location of cavity air inlet, and the configuration of cavity air outlet. A parametric study was conducted in a systematic way to evaluate the heat transfer characteristics of the double skin window. As the number of cavity air inlet and the cavity thickness increase, the heat flux from outside air to indoor air was decreased. The effect of the location of cavity air inlet was not significant and the larger cavity air outlet area gave us relatively better heat blocking performance from outside hot air. This study demonstrated that it is possible to develop an improved double skin window by utilizing a ground coupled heat exchanger.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
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• v.23 no.6
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• pp.392-399
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• 2011

Ground-coupled heat pump(GCHP) systems have been shown to be an environmentally-friendly, efficient alternative to traditional cooling and heating systems in both residential and commercial applications. Although some work related to performance evaluation of GCHP systems for commercial buildings has been done, relatively little has been reported on the residential applications. The aim of this study is to evaluate the cooling and heating performances of a vertical GCHP system applied to an artificial detached house($117\;m^2$) in Seoul. For this purpose, a typical design procedure was involved with a combination of design parameters such as building loads, heat pump capacity, borehole diameter, and ground thermal properties, etc. The cooling and heating performance simulation of the system was conducted with different prediction times of 8760 hours and 240 months. The performance characteristics including seasonal system COP, average annual power consumption, and temperature variations related to ground heat exchanger were calculated and compared.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Geothermal and Hydrothermal Energy
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.17-25
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• 2020

Ground-coupled heat pump (GCHP) systems have become an efficient alternative to conventional cooling and heating methods due to their higher energy using efficiency. Although some experimental and simulation works related to performance analysis of GCHP systems for commercial buildings have been done, relatively little has been reported on the performance evaluation of GCHP systems for school buildings. The purpose of this simulation study is to evaluate the performance of a hypothetical GCHP system for a school building in Seoul. We collected various data of building specifications and construction materials for the building and then modeled to calculate hourly building loads with SketchuUp and TRNSYS V17. In addition, we used GLD (Ground Loop Design) V2016, a GCHP system design and simulation software, to design the GCHP system for the building and to simulate temperature of circulating water in ground heat exchanger. The variation of entering source temperature (EST) into the system was calculated with different prediction time and then each result was compared. For 20 years of prediction time, EST for baseline design (Case A) based on the hourly simulation results were outranged from the design criteria.

• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.5-14
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• 2013

Among the various thermal properties, thermal conductivity of soils is one of the most important parameters to design a horizontal ground heat exchanger for ground-coupled heat pump systems. It is well known that the thermal conductivity of soil is strongly influenced by its density and water content because of its particulate structure. This paper evaluates some of the well-known prediction models for the thermal conductivity of particulate media such as soils along with the experimental results. The semi-theoretical models for two-component materials were found inappropriate to estimate the thermal conductivity of dry soils. It comes out that the model developed by Cote and Konrad provides the best overall prediction for unsaturated sands available in the literature. Also, a parametric analysis is conducted to investigate the effect of thermal conductivity, water content and soil type on the horizontal ground heat exchanger design. The results show that a design pipe length for the horizontal ground heat exchanger can be reduced with an increase in soil thermal conductivity. The current research concludes that the dimension of the horizontal ground heat exchanger can be reduced to a certain extent by backfilling materials with a higher thermal conductivity of solid particles.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Geothermal and Hydrothermal Energy
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• v.7 no.2
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• pp.51-59
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• 2011

Storage and transfer heat in soils are governed by the soil thermal properties and these properties are therefore needed in many engineering applications, including horizontal ground heat exchanger for ground-coupled heat pumps. This paper presents the measured results of the thermal diffusivity of soils(silica, quartzite, limestone, sandstone, and masonry soils) used for the trench backfilling materials of the horizontal ground heat exchanger. To assess this thermal property, we (i) measure the soil thermal conductivities and volumetric heat capacities using dual-probe method and (ii) compare the estimates from the de Vries method of summing the heat capacities of the soil constituents. The results show that the thermal diffusivity tends to increase as dry soil begins to wet, but it approaches a constant value or even decreases as the soil continues to wet. Measurements made by using the dual-probe method agreed well with independent estimates obtained using the single-probe method.