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Go to Editorial ManagerModern life makes energy, and the source of it is very important. This renewable energy comes from the Earth-Air Heat Exchanger (EAHE) in the soil employed as an air conditioning device for buildings in the climate conditions in Basrah city, south of Iraq. In the present study, the EAHE buried in the soil is simulated numerically using the finite volume method with a soft package. ANSYS: Fluent 2021/R2. A parametric analysis was carried out to determine the effect of three depths ( Z = 1, 2, and 3 m), taking into account the physical properties of the soil in the area under study, which is in the city of Basrah in southern Iraq, at longitude 47.749° and latitude 30.568°, as well as the data and time of 1/6/2023 at 12 p.m., the diameter of the pipe ( D = 7.62, 10.16, and 15.24 cm), and different velocities ( v = 0.5, 1, and 1.5 m/s). The results are presented as a temperature contour and a velocity contour for the performance of EAHE. The important results showed that when the depth of the buried pipe decreases, the temperature of the air outlet and heat exchanger increases; when the diameter decreases, the air outlet temperature from the EAHE and the soil temperature decrease; when the length of the pipe is about 30 m, after this length, the decrease in temperature is very small; and the maximum temperature difference of about 10 °C between the ambient temperature and the outlet temperature of the EAHE was obtained at a depth of 3 m and a velocity of 1 m/s at a diameter of 7.62 cm.
In this proposed study, all environmental factors affecting the aboveground and buried pipes, such as solar radiation and temperature, and soil temperature, have been studied on the characteristics of flow inside the aboveground and underground pipelines by building a mathematical model using MATLAB based on energy balance equations. From the mathematical model, the effect of solar radiation on the aboveground section of the pipeline is significate. During March and an inlet temperature of 34 °C, the pipeline outlet fluid temperature will rise to 50 °C. Other parameters affecting the aboveground section of the pipeline, such as ambient temperature and wind speed, have a much smaller effect on the fluid temperature, and the temperature difference is approximately 4 °C between the highest and lowest pipeline outlet fluid temperature. The result for the underground section of the pipeline showed that the main affecting parameter on the fluid temperature is the burry depth of the pipeline, the deeper the pipeline depth the lower the temperature variation and the lower fluid temperature can be seen, at 1 meter of bury depth the minimum and maximum fluid temperature was 18 °C and 36 °C respectively, and at 5 meters of bury depth, the minimum and maximum fluid temperature was 26 °C and 31 °C respectively. This study also checks different process parameters. Some of these are fluid flow, pipe diameter, and pipe material. The effect of the fluid flow and pipe diameter has a similar impact on the fluid temperature (while fixing all the other parameters), the higher the fluid flow or the smaller the pipe diameter resulted in a better heat transfer and more considerable temperature difference, and vice versa. The final process parameter, pipe material, had little to no effect on the fluid temperature variation.
Solar chimney (SC) together with earth to air heat exchanger (EAHE) is being employed as a low-energy consuming technique to remove undesirable interior heat from a building in the hot seasons. A numerical program "FLUENT 6.3 code" of an earth to air heat exchanger (EAHE) is studied for predicting the outlet air temperature and cooling potential of these devices in Basrah climate. Theoretical analyses have been conducted in order to investigate the ventilation in a solar chimney. The investigation into the viability of Low Energy Earth Pipe Cooling Technology in providing thermal comfort in Basrah. The demand for air-conditioning in buildings in Basrah affects the country escalating energy consumption. Therefore, this investigation was intended to seek for an alternative passive cooling to air-conditioning. The passive technology, where the ground was used as a heat sink to produce cooler air, has not been investigated systematically in hot and humid countries. A sub-soil temperature model adapted for the specific conditions in Basrah is presented and its output compared with CFD modeling. The results have shown that the potential of Earth Pipe is providing lower output temperature of air inlet to the room. We found that the resulting temperature at the buried pipe outlet decreases with increasing pipe length, decreasing pipe diameter, decreasing mass flow rate of flowing air in the pipe and increasing depths up to 4m.
Concerning commercial and residential buildings, one of the major parts related to water supply systems is the water storage tanks. For gravity- fed buildings, the tanks must be installed on the roof. In Iraqi summer, the temperature of water in storage tanks reaches above 50 °C due to high solar intensity, which makes it inappropriate for domestic usage. One of the proposed solutions to overcome this problem is feeding the hot water into an earth-water heat exchanger (EWHE) which consists of a set of buried pipes installed underground level to reduce its temperature. The storage tank and the earth-water heat exchanger were studied experimentally and theoretically by using ANSYS 20/FLUENT software to estimating the water temperature in the storage tank and the temperature of the water leaving the EWHE. The most important results obtained theoretically and experimentally that when using pipe length, pipe diameter, and mass flow rate of 100 m, 0.016 m, 0.7 LPM respectively, at a depth of 3 m, the water temperature decreases by about 15 °C. Also, the results have shown a good agreement between the experimental and theoretical works. One can conclude that an earth-water heat exchanger is an effective way to decrease the temperature of the storage water to an acceptable level for domestic usages.