ISBN 978-3-8439-1213-6

978-3-8439-1213-6, Reihe Informatik

Markus Beck
Optimization of Shallow Geothermal Heating Plants

128 Seiten, Dissertation Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen (2013), Softcover, A5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

Direct geothermal energy use becomes more and more a popular way of managing the space heating and cooling demand of buildings. The efficient operation of ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems with multiple borehole heat exchangers (BHEs) over a lifetime of decades implies an optimized performance of the BHEs and a mitigation of the environmental impact of the system.

This thesis introduces new methods, which combine approaches from mathematical optimization and evolutionary algorithms with hydrogeological modelling to allow a simulation based planning optimization of ground source heat pump (GSHP) systems. New, so far not considered degrees of freedom, like an individual adjustment of BHE workloads and the identification of optimal BHE positions within a given planning area are included and an application on a wide variety of hydrogeological scenarios reveals that there is a significant optimization potential compared to present standard practice. First results show, that for example induced ground temperature changes in the ground could

be reduced up to 30 % depending on the scenario and that optimized BHE fields are able to extract significantly more energy from the ground while keeping the caused temperature changes in the ground in the same range. Further, several benchmark studies to identify the optimization algorithms, which are best suited to tackle the given problems, were accomplished and mechanisms to make optimization runs less time and memory consuming were developed.