Experimental and modeling analysis of a ground source heat pump system

This paper presents the evaluation of the performance of a ground source heat pump system monitored plant providing heating/cooling to an office building located in the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia in Spain. The system was designed using GLHEPRO software and it has been monitored since 2005. Once a ground source heat pump has been designed, it is important to analyze its performance along the years after its construction and check whether the design was appropriate and the simulation predictions were consistent with real experimental measurements. This paper first presents the impact of the GSHP system in the ground thermal response. The simulations obtained in GLHEPRO software will be analyzed and compared to experimental measurements. The second purpose of this work is to compare the performance simulation results of a complete ground source heat pump system model built in TRNSYS, with the experimental measurements which have been registered and collected for one cooling day. Numerical predictions and experimental results are compared and discussed. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.