Experimental investigation on the ground heat exchanger with air fluid

The pollution caused by overuse of fossil fuels leads to global warming, which is a serious threat to the world. With the continuous increase in energy demand, renewable energy resources have become more important in recent years in order to meet the rapidly decreasing energy resources and to meet the increasing energy demand. In order to use the available resources and alternative energy systems more efficiently, it has become a necessity to develop systems, which are affordable, open to the technological developments, easy to maintain and compatible with the legal restrictions. Although there are some studies on humidified ground-source heat exchangers in the literature in recent years, there is not sufficient number of study on this subject. In addition, available studies are generally focused on the dry soil applications. In this study, cooling experiments of the energy laboratory at the campus of Sakarya University were performed using the wet ground-source heat exchanger, and air as the process fluid. For this purpose, ground-source heat exchanger pipes are placed in an artificial pool of 80 m2 area and 2.5 m depth. Experiments, which were conducted during the summer months and 9–10 kW heat energy, were transferred to the soil. The study showed that energy costs for cooling could be decreased by this method. If the proposed model is integrated to the structures during the installation stage, it is predicted that air conditioning costs can be reduced.