mojica

THERMO-HYDRAULIC DESIGN OF EARTH-AIR HEAT EXCHANGERS

ABSTRACT
Earth-air heat exchangers, also called ground tube heat exchangers, are an interesting
technique to reduce energy consumption in a building. They can cool or heat
the ventilation air, using cold or heat accumulated in the soil. Several papers have been
published in which a design method is described. Most of them are based on
a discretisation of the one-dimensional heat transfer problem in the tube. Three-
dimensional complex models, solving conduction and moisture transport in the soil are also
found. These methods are of high complexity and often not ready for use by designers. In
this paper, a one-dimensional analytical method is used to analyse the influence of the
design parameters of the heat exchanger on the thermo-hydraulic performance. A relation is
derived for the specific pressure drop, linking thermal effectiveness with pressure drop of
the air inside the tube. The relation is used to formulate a design method which can be used
to determine the characteristic dimensions of the earth-air heat exchanger in such a way that
optimal thermal effectiveness is reached with acceptable pressure loss. The choice of the
characteristic dimensions, becomes thus independent of the soil and climatological
conditions. This allows designers to choose the earth-air heat exchanger configuration with
the best performance.

KEYWORDS
Thermo-hydraulic, Heat exchangers, Earth-air, Ventilation
diego

CFD APPLICATIONS IN VARIOUS HEAT EXCHANGERS DESIGN: A REVIEW

ABSTRACT
This literature review focuses on the applications of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
in the field of heat exchangers. It has been found that CFD has been employed for the
following areas of study in various types of heat exchangers: fluid flow maldistribution,
fouling, pressure drop and thermal analysis in the design and optimization phase. Different
turbulence models available in general purpose commercial CFD tools i.e. standard,
realizable and RNG k − ε RSM, and SST k − ε in conjunction with velocity-pressure
coupling schemes such as SIMPLE, SIMPLEC, PISO and etc. have been adopted to carry
out the simulations. The quality of the solutions obtained from these simulations are largely
within the acceptable range proving that CFD is an effective tool for predicting the
behavior and performance of a wide variety of heat exchangers.

KEYWORDS
CFD, Heat Exchangers, Pressure Drop, Thermal Analysis, Flow Maldistribution
machado
GLHEPRO- A DESIGN TOOL FOR COMMERCIAL BUILDING GROUND LOOP
HEAT EXCHANGERS
ABSTRACT
Ground source heat pump systems, ground loop heat exchangers, design tools. GLHEPro is
a design tool for commercial building ground loop heat exchangers. The design
methodology is based on a simulation that predicts the temperature response of the ground
loop heat exchanger to monthly heating and cooling loads and monthly peak heating and
cooling demands over a number of years. The design procedure involves automatically
adjusting the ground loop heat exchanger size in order to meet user-specified minimum or
maximum heat pump entering fluid temperatures. The prediction of temperature response
has three parts: a simple heat pump model allows for building heating and cooling loads to
be translated to heat extraction and heat rejection rates; the long term temperature response
of a ground loop heat exchanger to heat rejection and extraction is based on a detailed
conduction heat transfer simulation developed by Eskilson(1); and short-term temperature
response of the ground loop heat exchanger is estimated with a simple analytical
approximation for the response of the ground loop heat exchanger to a single peak heat
extraction or rejection pulse.

KEYWORDS
heat exchanger, design tool, commercial building ground