Using earth to air heat exchangers for space cooling.

This paper deals with the thermal performance of an earth to air heat exchanger for cooling and heating purposes. The cooling system consists of an earth tube buried in the ground through which ambient air is propelled and cooled by the bulk temperature of the natural ground. Fresh or indoor air can be circulated inside the tube. A new, more accurate, transient, implicit, numerical model based on the coupled and simultaneous transfer of heat and mass into the soil and the pipe has been developed. The proposed model was validated against experimental data and it was found that predicts accurately the temperature of the air along the tube and the temperature distribution of the ground at any point in the pipe vicinity.