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  • 1. Gross, Paul Commercial Program Development for a Ground Loop Geothermal System: Energy Loads, GUI, Turbulent Flow, Heat Pump Model and Grid Study

    Master of Science in Engineering (MSEgr), Wright State University, 2011, Renewable and Clean Energy

    The use of the earth's thermal energy to heat and cool building space is nothing new; however, the heat transfer approximations used in modeling geothermal systems, leave uncertainty and lead to over sizing. The present work is part of a Wright State effort to improve the computer modeling tools used to simulate ground loop geothermal heating and cooling systems. The modern computer processor has equipped us with the computation speed to use a finite volume technique to solve the unsteady heat equation with hourly time steps for multi-year analyses in multiple spatial dimensions. Thus we feel there is more need to use approximate heat transfer solution techniques to model geothermal heating and cooling systems. As part of a DOE funded project Wright State has been developing a ground loop geothermal computer modeling tool that uses a detailed heat transfer model based on the governing differential energy equation. This tool is meant to be more physically detailed and accurate than current commercial ground loop geothermal computer codes. The Wright State code allows the geothermal designer to optimize the system using a number of outputs including temperature field outputs, existing fluid temperature plots, heat exchange plots, and even a histogram of the COP data. Careful attention to the algorithm speed allows for multi-year simulations with minimal computation cost. Once the thermal and heat transfer computations are complete, a payback period calculator can compare any conventional heating and cooling system to the designed geothermal system and payback periods are displayed. The work being presented as part of this thesis deals with five issues that were required to make the Wright State geothermal computer code a reality. The five aspects of this modeling tool addressed by this thesis work are: energy load calculations, GUI (graphical user interface) development, turbulence model development, heat pump model development, and two-dimensional numerical grid deve (open full item for complete abstract)

    Committee: James Menart PhD (Committee Chair); Hong Huang PhD (Committee Member); Chung-Jen Tam PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Mechanical Engineering