Free cooling and PVT integration in a ground-source heat pump (GSHP) system

Abstract: The performance of ground-source heat pump (GSHP) systems can be negatively affected over time by soil temperature degradation of boreholes (BH) in heating dominated climates. Land area is scarce in the dense urban environments typical of multi-family houses (MFH) and can lead to accelerated degradation- in tight BH fields. Heat extracted from photovoltaic thermal collectors (PVT) can help with BH regeneration; thus, limiting degradation. Additionally, free cooling (FC) is proposed in this study to tackle the anticipated cooling demandi ncrease in Sweden, while resolving the listed challenges of GSHP systems. A novel multi-source (MS) system integrating FC, PVT and GSHP together shall be investigated in this study. Firstly, implementing FC in a GSHP system for the scenario considered only provided marginal regeneration of the BH in the longterm. Both the SPF4+ and total life cycle cost (TLCC) of an FC+GSHP and GSHPsystem remained virtually constant. Furthermore, operation interference of FC and PVT in the MS system can be mitigated by considering their relative location in the system. In this study, cooling is the priority, thus placing the FC system after the BH field but before the PVT system in the brine loop is recommended. In that case, only 0.56% of the annual cooling is not delivered due to FC operation interference and the PVT thermal yield is decreased on average by 3.52%. By decreasing the BH spacing from 15 to 5 m, a slight SPF4+ increase to 3.22 is possible in a system with FC and 48 PVT collectors. With a sensitivity analysis it was shown that if a 15% decrease is achieved in electricity prices then the TLCC of this system can be lower than the TLCC of 2.13 MSEK for a GSHP system.