Evaluation of the Annual Performance of the Direct Expansion Vertical Closed-Loop Ground Source Heat Pump

직접순환식 수직밀폐형 지열원 열펌프의 연간 운전성능 평가

Vertical closed-loop ground source heat pump systems(GSHP) have been installed widely in Korea since it can extract moderate temperature level of geothermal heat in a small area. As a ground heat exchanger, a vertical closed-loop type with brine circulation is mostly preferred since it is simple and less harmful to ground environment. However, it requires a secondary heat exchange loop between the refrigerant in a heat pump and the brine. By adding a geothermal heat exchanger in the secondary heat exchange loop, circulation pumps should be attached and the temperature difference between refrigerant and ground is increased, which are important parts of performance degradation. In this paper, annual and seasonal performances of direct expansion(DX) geothermal heat pump were estimated mathematically as an alternative of classical indirect geothermal heat pump based on the annual performance evaluation. As a result, DX geothermal heat pump showed 43% higher annual performance than the classical U-tube geothermal heat pump.