A finite difference based tool for analysing ground source heat pump system

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.