Modelling of the borehole filling of double U-pipe heat exchangers

A new model MISOS is proposed for the simulation of the borehole filling (grout) of double U-pipe heat exchangers. When simulating ground-coupled heat pumps, a suitable model of the filling is necessary because the temperature of the filling effects the temperature of the heat carrier fluid. The filling is divided into three elements whose geometry corresponds to the different temperature zones. For each time step, the temperatures of the filling elements can be calculated from energy balances. MISOS is very fast compared to computational fluid dynamics (CFD) algorithms. CFD calculations were performed for different shank spacings, and results compared with those obtained from MISOS. If the pipe shanks are situated between the axis and the wall of the borehole, nearly the same difference of the fluid temperature between inlet and outlet is predicted by MISOS and CFD. For a minimal shank spacing, heating is overpredicted by about 6% for an extraction period of 3 h while an underprediction of about 9% is obtained for maximal shank spacing.