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Dear Colleagues,

With the rapid development of the economy and human society, the energy and environmental issues have become more and more critical. Over the last decade, new paths in energy savings and greenhouse gas reductions have led to exploring alternative technologies to convert energy more efficiently and cleanly. One of the significant energy consumers is heating and cooling sector for satisfying residential living comfort. As society aspires to low carbon living portfolios, meeting sustainable heating and cooling needs has become a challenge and an opportunity as high portion of heating infrastructure is still fossil-fuels based. As such, electrification of the residential heating sector with efficient air and ground based heat pumps is gaining importance as a technological field where electrical energy may be provided by low carbon sources. There has been sustained advancement in heat pump development in order to economically and ecologically offset natural gas or propane fuels in many regions. This special issue aims at raising awareness on the emerging topic of clean electrification of the residential heating and cooling sector with heat pumps. Focus is set upon the recent research progress in design of different efficient heat pump components and heat pump exchange systems such as air units, borehole heat exchangers, groundwater production and underground thermal energy storage. Special attention is on the interdisciplinary research in this field to provide a venue for research findings from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Prof. Dr. Tomislav Kurevija
Dr. Marija Macenić
Guest Editors

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Keywords

renewable heating and cooling
decarbonisation
heat pumps
borehole heat exchangers
au-air units
thermal energy storage
geoexchange
district heating and cooling grids
cost and efficiency

Published Papers (1 paper)

Research

Open AccessArticle

Drilling Deeper in Shallow Geoexchange Heat Pump Systems—Thermogeological, Energy and Hydraulic Benefits and Restraints

Tomislav Kurevija

Marija Macenić

and

Martina Tuschl

Energies 2023, 16(18), 6577; https://doi.org/10.3390/en16186577 - 12 Sep 2023

Viewed by 389

Abstract

In the last decade, due to climate change concerns and new environmental regulations in the EU, there was a tremendous rise in installed heat pump systems in new homes and buildings. The majority of these installed units are related to air-source heat pumps, as they offer a good trade-off between capital and operating expenses. However, when analysing heating and cooling heat pump systems from the primary energy consumption and ecological aspects, groundwater and shallow geothermal heat pump systems offer superior efficiency, compared to all market-available thermo-technical systems today. In the last decade, ground-source systems have seen some technological improvement by employing new borehole heat exchanger designs, such as piping with internal fins and a wider diameter (so called Turbocollector) to enhance the heat transfer between fluid and rock, as well as to reduce the pressure drop in the system. Furthermore, the process of drilling deeper offers higher ground temperatures and consequently higher seasonal performance factors in the heating cycle, due to the effect of the geothermal gradient. Nevertheless, although deeper boreholes provide better heat extraction rates per meter during the heat pump heating cycle, at the same time, it reduces heat rejection rates during the heat pump cooling cycle. The objective of this paper is to analyse and evaluate benefits and downsides of a new approach in the heat pump system design with deeper borehole heat exchangers of up to 300 m, comparing it to the traditional design of double-loop exchangers with 100 m depth. The geothermal borehole grid design simulation model, along with heat extraction and rejection, is performed on a yearly basis. The results are showing that the benefits of shallow geothermal boreholes, from the hydraulic and thermodynamic point of view, still dominate over deeper solutions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Performance of Heat Pumps and Heat Exchangers for Domestic Use)

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Special Issue "Performance of Heat Pumps and Heat Exchangers for Domestic Use"

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