Computational Modeling of Shallow Geothermal Systems

Geothermal heat is a renewable source of energy offering a number of advantages over conventional fossil fuel resources, particularly its environmental impact in terms of CO 2 emissions is significantly lower. Shallow geothermal energy is considered as one of the alternative energy resources and has been widely utilized for heating of buildings and greenhouses, using borehole heat exchangers (BHE). BHE is an extremely slender heat pipe with dimensions of the order of 30mm in diameter and 100m in length. The slenderness of the borehole heat exchanger exerts enormous computational challenges. As a result, current computational procedures are either over-simplified, or computationally very demanding. The increasing demand for shallow geothermal energy systems in practice necessitates the development of innovative computational methods and tools capable of producing accurate results in affordable computing time. This reference book provides the means to develop such tools. It presents innovative computational modeling of shallow geothermal systems consisting of borehole heat exchangers embedded in a soil mass. A wide range of computational modeling spanning from analytical, semi-analytical to numerical procedures is presented and it also describes the basic concepts in heat transfer processes, and engineering examples using the well known finite element package, FEFLOW.