An Innovative Use of Renewable Ground Heat for Insulation in Low Exergy Building Systems

Energies

Forrest Meggers¹  Luca Baldini² 

[1] Singapore-ETH Centre, Future Cities Laboratory, Low Exergy Module, Singapore 118999, Singapore;ETH Zurich, Institute for Technology in Architecture, Building Systems, Zurich 8093, Switzerland; E-Mails:

关键词: buildings;    insulation;    geothermal;    ground heat;    heat pumps;    exergy;   

DOI  :  10.3390/en5083149

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Ground heat is a renewable resource that is readily available for buildings in cool climates, but its relatively low temperature requires the use of a heat pump to extract it for heating. We developed a system that uses low temperature ground heat directly in a building wall to reduce transmission heat losses. The Active Low Exergy Geothermal Insulation Systems (ALEGIS) minimizes exergy demand and maximizes the use of renewable geothermal heat from the ground. A fluid is pumped into a small pipe network in an external layer of a wall construction that is linked to a ground heat source. This decouples the building from the outside temperature, therefore eliminating large peak demands and reducing the primary energy demand. Our steady-state analysis shows that at a design temperature of −10 °C the 6 cm thick active insulation system has equivalent performance to 11 cm of passive insulation. Our comparison of heating performance of a building with our active insulation system versus a building with static insulation of the same thickness shows a 15% reduction in annual electricity demand, and thus exergy input. We present an overview of the operation and analysis of our low exergy concept and its modeled performance.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2012 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.