Soil temperature distribution around a U-tube heat exchanger in a multi-function ground source heat pump system

The imbalance of heat extracted from the earth by the underground heat exchangers in winter and ejected into it in summer is expected to affect the long term performance of conventional ground source heat pump (GSHP) in territories with a cold winter and a warm summer such as the middle and downstream areas of the Yangtze River in China.

This paper presents a new multi-function ground source heat pump (MFGSHP) system which supplies hot water as well as space cooling/heating to mitigate the soil imbalance of the extracted and ejected heat by a ground source heat pump system. The heat transfer characteristic is studied and the soil temperature around the underground heat exchangers are simulated under a typical climatic condition of the Yangtze River.

A three-dimensional model was constructed with the commercial computational fluid dynamics software FLUENT based on the inner heat source theory. Temperature distribution and variation trend of a tube cluster of the underground heat exchanger are simulated for the long term performance. The results show that the soil temperature around the underground tube keeps increasing due to the surplus heat ejected into the earth in summer, which deteriorates the system performance and may lead to the eventual system deterioration.

The simulation shows that MFGSHP can effectively alleviate the temperature rise by balancing the heat ejected to/extracted from underground by the conventional ground source heat pump system. The new system also improves the energy efficiency.