Ground Heat Exchanger - Surface

Surface heat exchangers include pavement surfaces with embedded pipes for snow-melting or heat rejection from hybrid ground source heat pump systems. The heat exchanger may be ground coupled or not and when not ground coupled the bottom surface is exposed to the wind but not solar gains.

 

This type of heat exchanger is intended to be connected to the supply side of a condenser loop, and can be used with any type of plant loop. The surface heat exchanger may be specified as the only heat exchanger on the condenser loop (as shown in the first figure below) or it may be connected in parallel with other condenser loop heat exchangers (such as cooling towers, ground surface heat exchangers) as shown in the second figure below.

 

Surface Ground Heat Exchanger as only heat exchanger on condenser loop

 

Surface Ground Heat Exchanger with other heat exchangers on condenser loop

 

General

Name

This alpha field contains the identifying name for the outside panel heat exchanger.

Template

You can use this control to load data to the dialog from a pre-defined Ground heat exchanger template as a starting point for your particular pond component.

Type

DesignBuilder provides 3 different ground heat exchanger types:

 

Ground Heat Exchanger - Surface

Construction

The Construction selected here defines the layers of materials used to make the heat exchange surface.

 

Note: The construction must include an Internal Source to accommodate the heat exchange pipes.

 

If you select a construction with large thickness to represent the ground you may need to use the 2-Finite difference Solution algorithm either for this construction only or for the whole model.

Lower Surface Environment

This alpha field expresses the lower surface exposure. Options are:

 

Surface length

This numeric field contains the surface length (in m or ft).

Surface width

This numeric field contains the surface width (in m or ft).

Number of tubing circuits

This numeric field contains the number of hydronic tubing circuits.

Hydronic tube spacing

This numeric field contains the hydronic tube spacing (in m or ft).

Hydronic tubing inside diameter

This numeric field contains the hydronic tubing inside diameter (in m or in).