Innovative Ground Storage

Solar energy is a very important source of energy and has a very high potential. The main problems connected to its utilization are its low intensity and availability. Utilization of solar energy in the building sector is needed for the purpose of either heating or cooling.

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The main issue is to manage the solar energy source and make this available in case of need. So in order to make it possible, the storage system is necessary. The article will give a brief idea in the development of a configuration for a ground heat storage and its modeling, for the calculation of the performances of the system.

Project Description:

Ground temperature after a certain depth into the earth is constant over all the year. This is because that the soil mass is very large and its thermal capacity is large as well. For this reason, the idea to use the soil as a heat exchanger to preheat a working fluid in winter and precool it in summer has been developed.

To exploit the ground thermal capacity it is necessary a heat exchanger. Basically, it consists of buried pipes in the ground. To exploit the deep zone is necessary to drill the ground with very large vertical borehole and only if the geothermal gradient of temperature is significant. To exploit the shallow zone horizontal pipes are buried. The system ground pipes behave like a heat exchanger. The classification is between open and closed systems. In an open system, the working fluid that is exchanging heat with the ground is the same that after can be used for space heating or cooling. In the closed system, the media is used as a source to exchange heat with another fluid.

The air can be recirculated in the loop with a large influence on the overall performance of the system. By recirculating air in the loop during winter, low inlet temperature in the system is avoided, and then it is realized the possibility to make the system able to supply air at interesting temperature for a longer period.

Project Implementation:

The analysis of a ground storage involve a big volume in the ground, therefore, it is very expensive from a computational point of view to make an analysis in the time domain. And if it is considered that basically, the heat transfer in the ground is by conduction, the partial differential equation that describes the phenomenon is linear.

Various finite element analysis is done and the test is conducted for various assumed example variables and air as working fluid the system can have good performances and can be used as a good source for a heat pump and also for a preheating system supplying directly part of the heat needed from the house.

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• solar panel
• Multiphysics

• groundwater
• Linear time invariant
• Fourier analysis

Innovative Ground Storage