24 June 2014

A SIMPLE TOOL FOR SIMULATION OF GROUND SOURCE HEAT PUMP SYSTEMS

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The Building and Environmental Thermal Systems Research Group (BETSRG) at Oklahoma State University has developed a number of ground heat exchanger models for use in simulation of ground source heat pump systems in the HVACSIM+ simulation
environment. Unfortunately, HVACSIM+ remains difficult for practicing engineers to use. Nevertheless, there are many situations where an easy to use hourly simulation of a ground source heat pump system would be useful. Therefore, we have developed Excel interfaces to two vertical ground heat exchanger models previously developed in HVACSIM+. At present,
this allows users to simulate a ground source heat pump system on an hourly time step for multiple years. This flexibility and ease-of-use comes at the cost of some computation speed
– we adopted an iterative scheme to account for the simultaneous effects of the ground heat exchanger on the heat pump and the heat pump on the ground heat exchanger. Nevertheless, we believe this to be a highly useful tool for practitioners who may not have
expertise in the use of HVACSIM+, TRNSYS or other similar tools.