Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament d'Enginyeria del Terreny, Cartogràfica i Geofísica
Abstract
The ground heat exchangers (GHE) consist of pipes buried in the soil and are used for transferring
heat between the soil and the heat exchanger pipes of the ground source heat pump (GSHP). This
paper presents the development of a numerical tool for anlysing the behaviour of horizontal ground
source heat pump system. The tool was developed in Visual C++ environment. Impicilit finite
difference heat conduction method was employed. The numerical solution was obtained by LU
factorisation. For certain heat demand in a house and for known horizontal ground loop length, the
numerical tool analyses whether the available ground loop length would be suffient to supply heat
energy for the life time of GSHP system without reaching subzero temperature at any time
