Energy diaphragm wall thermal design: The effects of pipe configuration and spacing
Section snippets
Geothermal energy diaphragm walls
Shallow geothermal systems are utilised around the globe to provide renewable energy for heating and cooling buildings, contributing towards tackling the critical global problems of increasing energy demand, depleting natural resources and the effect of greenhouse gas emissions. These systems transfer heat between the building and the ground, utilising the latter as a heat source or sink. Ground-source heat pumps (GSHPs, either one or several) are connected to the building heating/cooling
Methodology
This work aims to provide a further understanding on the geothermal design of energy diaphragm retaining walls and determine the impact of factors such as the pipe configuration, site location (i.e., ground thermal properties), and geo-structure geometry (i.e., wall depth, thickness). Detailed finite element numerical modelling is utilised throughout to simulate the thermal performance of the system under a range of different conditions. A parametric analysis is presented to identify how
Results & discussion
This section presents and discusses the results of the various investigations on energy diaphragm walls. An example case is firstly shown, for fixed values of most parameters in Table 2, discussing GSHP design practices and serving as an introduction to the more wholistic analyses. Section 3.2 is the most comprehensive one, providing a number of analyses on the thermal performance of these structures. Amongst the key aims of this research is to identify the importance of pipe spacing as well as
Summary and conclusions
This work investigated the potential of energy diaphragm walls as energy geo-structures, utilising an experimentally validated finite element modelling methodology. A large-scale parametric study was undertaken, using data from a total of 480 25-year long simulations, focusing on the thermal performance of the energy geo-structures and the impact of key design parameters on this performance. The study focuses mainly on the effects of the pipe configuration and spacing, which in the case of
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Nikolas Makasis: Conceptualization, Data curation, Methodology, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Visualization, Writing - original draft. Guillermo A. Narsilio: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Visualization, Writing - review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
Funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) FT140100227, The University of Melbourne, the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority and the Victorian Government is much appreciated.
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