EVALUATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL PARAMETERS ON THE PERFORMANCE OF EARTH TO AIR HEAT EXCHANGERS

THERMAL ENGINEERING

The earth to air heat exchangers (EAHE) is effective passive cooling and heating techniques for buildings. This paper studies numerically the effect of some design and environmental parameters (moist content of soil, pipe material and thickness of pipe wall) on the overall performance of EAHE system. Three types of soil were selected (dry soil, moist soil and saturated soil) with two pipe materials PVC and steel and three thicknesses of pipe wall (2, 3 and 6 mm). This numerical study has been done for summer and winter seasons according to the weather conditions. First the built numerical model was validated against experimental model and the results of comparison showed good agreement. After the validation the overall performance of EAHE system with selected parameters was analysed with ranges of air velocity, inlet temperature and pipe length of 30 m. The simulated results showed that the very moist or saturated soil gives the best overall performance of EAHE system compare with other soils, Furthermore there is no significant effect of pipe material and wall thickness on the overall performance. The geometry of the problem and meshing of it have been made in and the models have been solved by ANSYS Workbench. CFD models or packages provides the contours and data which predict the performance of the heat exchanger design and are effectively used because it has ability to obtain optimal solutions and has work in difficult and hazardous conditions.

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