Integrated model of horizontal earth pipe cooling system for a hot humid climate

Energy efficiency of a building has become a major requirement since the building sector produces 40%-50% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. This can be achieved by improving building’s performance through energy savings, by adopting energy efficient technologies and reducing CO2 emissions. There exist several technologies with less or no environmental impact that can be used to reduce energy consumption of the buildings. Earth pipe cooling system is one of them, which works with a long buried pipe with one end for intake air and the other end for providing air cooled by soil to the building. It is an approach for cooling a room in a passive process without using any habitual mechanical unit. The paper investigates the thermal performance of a horizontal earth pipe cooling system in a hot and humid subtropical climatic zone in Queensland, Australia. An integrated numerical model for the horizontal earth pipe cooling system and the room (or building) was developed using ANSYS Fluent to measure the thermal performance of the system. The impact of air temperature, soil temperature, air velocity and relative humidity on room cooling performance has also been assessed. As the soil temperature was below the outdoor minimum temperature during the peak warming hours of the day, it worked as an effective heat sink to cool the room. Both experimental and numerical results showed a temperature reduction of 1.11oC in the room utilizing horizontal earth pipe cooling system which will assist to save the energy cost in the buildings.

Parametric study on thermal performance of horizontal earth pipe cooling system in summer

Rational use of energy and its associated greenhouse gas emissions has become a key issue for a sustainable environment and economy. A substantial amount of energy is consumed by today's buildings which are accountable for about 40% of the global energy consumption. There are on-going researches in order to overcome these and find new techniques through energy efficient measures. Passive air cooling of earth pipe cooling technique is one of those which can save energy in buildings with no greenhouse gas emissions. The performance of the earth pipe cooling system is mainly affected by the parameters, namely air velocity, pipe length, pipe diameter, pipe material, and pipe depth. This paper investigates the impact of these parameters on thermal performance of the horizontal earth pipe cooling system in a hot humid subtropical climate at Rockhampton, Australia. For the parametric investigation, a thermal model was developed for the horizontal earth pipe cooling system using the simulation program, FLUENT 15.0. Results showed a significant effect for air velocity, pipe length, and pipe diameter on the earth pipe cooling performance, where the pipe length dominated the other parameters.