Optimal Design for a Hybrid Ground-Source Heat Pump

Although the advantages of ground-source heat pumps over their conventional alternatives make these systems a very attractive choice for air conditioning, not only for residential buildings but increasingly also for institutional and commercial buildings, a significant barrier to wider application of this technology is a high first cost. When used in cooling-dominated buildings, ground-source heat pumps that utilize vertical, closed-loop ground heat exchangers can experience performance degradation as the entering fluid temperature to the heat pump increases over time due to heat buildup in the borefield. In these cases, it is possible to displace a large portion of the system cost by installing a supplemental heat rejecter to balance the annual heat extraction from the ground. The paper presented has shown that the heat rejection of the GLHEs and the system energy consumption are approached to discuss the ground heat balance with different design procedures and control strategies though the system simulation.