AT-01-08-3 -- Ground-Coupled Heat Pump System Simulation PDF

This article proposes a relatively simple procedure to perform annual hour-by-hour simulations of ground-coupled heat pump systems equipped with vertical U-tube ground heat exchangers. In the first part of the paper, the classic cylindrical heat source solution is revisited, and a methodology to incorporate load aggregation is proposed. Then, it is shown that by using an appropriate equation solver, the coupled governing equations of ground heat transfer and heat pump performance can be solved iteratively to obtain accurate annual heat pump energy consumption in a relatively short simulation time (»20 minutes on a Pentium II 266 MHz machine). Finally, it is shown that an accurate determination of the fluid loop temperature requires a large value of the load aggregation parameter.

Units: Dual