Can energy piles be used as ground heat exchangers?

Energy piles offer a promising and eco-friendly technique to heat or cool buildings. Energy piles can be exploited as ground heat exchangers of a ground source heat pump system. In such application, the energy pile and its surrounding soil are subjected to temperature changes that could significantly affect the pile–soil interaction behaviour.

What is energy pile?

The energy pile concept can be considered as a to cool/heat buildings is the heat pump (HP) system. Unlike the vast cost of drilling boreholes and the land area required for borehole could be readily employed almost anywhere. Although HPs are installation.

How much solar energy can a 10 m-long energy pile store?

Under the specific thermal boundary conditions adopted, the maximum daily average rate of solar energy storage reached 150 W/m for the 10 m-long energy pile. It decreased to about 35 W/m as the pile length increased to 50 m.

Do energy piles have a heat exchange capacity?

The heat exchange capacity of the energy pile depends on the thermal resistivity of the pile and the surrounding soils. The consequently, their thermal behaviour could be different. The pile Lennon et al., 2009; Wood et al., 2010) is not in good agreement with the theoretically calculated value.

How does pile size affect solar energy storage?

As the pile diameter increases, there has a relatively larger volume of concrete for solar energy storage, leading to a lower pile temperature. As a result of its lower temperature, a higher rate of solar energy storage is observed for cases with larger pile diameters.

How do energy piles work?

The energy piles combine the foundation piles with the heat exchange pipes, the latter being attached to the steel cage and embedded in the pile body, as illustrated in Fig. 1. In this way, the energy piles sustain the building load and hold the heat exchange pipes simultaneously.