ground heat exchangers (Earth-to-Air Heat Exchangers)

berny · Posts: 1

Hi Andy,

Is it possible in DB to design a ventilation with ground heat exchangers (Earth-to-Air Heat Exchangers) in order to obtain accurate values for external ventilation heat losses ?

Thanks

Franck

Andy Tindale · Posts: 2432 Location: Stroud

Hi Franck,

DesignBuilder does not allow ventilation with ground heat exchangers yet, though the latest version of EnergyPlus does have this feature. So you could use DesignBuilder to set up your base model and complete the model using IDF script.

Regards
Andy

koen.govers · Posts: 81

The latest version of Designbuilder, can it use ground heat exchangers? Or can it be moddeled in an other way ? (Using a circular basement ..?)

Koen

Steve Potter · Posts: 572 Location: newcastle

Hi Koen

I'm afraid it's not yet possible to model ground heat exchangers within DesignBuilder but you can do what Andy suggests and incorporate them by editing the IDF file.

Regards

Steve

koen.govers · Posts: 81

Andy, Steve,

I was thinking.

We have the exit air temperature from different exchangers (simulated with another program)on a hour to hour base for a whole year for different ventilation rates.

Can this be used as an input file instead of the air temperatures from the weather file?

Koen

Andy Tindale · Posts: 2432 Location: Stroud

Koen,

I can't think of a way to input a schedule of outside air temperatures for ventilation.

Are you aware of the EnergyPlus EARTHTUBE object? If you were prepared to 'get your hands dirty' working with EnergyPlus script you could model 'ground to air' heat exchange this way. I expect we will implement this object in DesignBuilder sometime, but it is not in the immediate development plan. This object does require use of a simple external calculation utility called CalcSoilSurfTemp that is supplied with EnergyPlus. CalcSoilSurfTemp requires 2 input fields and the hourly weather data file to generate some of the input data required for the EARTHTUBE data.

Here is an example of data definition:

koen.govers · Posts: 81

Hi,

I would like to know what the current status is of ground heat exchanger in DB.

Is there any progress on this application?
Are there some new user friendly solutions to model this?

Kind regards,
Filip

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