Modelling of Shaded and Unshaded Shallow-Ground Heat Pump System for a Residential Building Block in a Mediterranean Climate

Heat pumps may be coupled to shallow-ground geothermal fields and used for the purpose of space heating and cooling of buildings. However, quite often it is not possible to locate the geothermal field in cleared grounds, especially in cities where building density is high and land has a high premium. This leads to the possibility of burying the geothermal field under the basement of new building blocks, before construction of the building. In the present work, the shaded-unshaded arrangement is numerically studied by coupling the software DesignBuilder-EnergyPlus to assess the building’s energy requirement with the software FEFLOW to solve the heat transfer equation in porous media. Assuming a standard residential building block, the coupling between the two software is performed by assigning the thermal energy requirement for air conditioning, as calculated by EnergyPlus, to a flatpanel typology of ground heat exchanger simplified in a 2D FEFLOW’s domain. The results show that it is necessary to opt for a dual-source heat pump (air/geothermal) system to ensure that the ground is not frozen or over-heated at peak times and to improve the overall performance of the system.