Experimental investigation on performance of a heating and cooling system with ground coupled heat pump

In this thesis, an experimental investigation on thermal performance of a space heating and cooling system with a Ground Coupled Heat Pump (GCHP) is performed. Therefore, a testing system under investigation was constructed in Laboratories site of the Mechanical Engineering Department, University of Gaziantep (37.1oN), Turkey. The system was mainly consisted of a test room to be heated in winter and cooled in summer season, vertical slinky pipe buried in the ground, heat pump with variable capacity, circulation pump, heat exchanger, temperature and pressure measuring elements, water flow meter, data logger and a personnel computer (PC).Thermal performance of the heating and cooling system was obtained by using measurement parameters for the room, slinky pipe, compressor, circulating pump and fan motors, condenser and evaporator. The parameters are temperatures and pressures of the refrigerant (R410A) circulated in the heat pump cycle, current and voltage for the each motor, temperature and mass flow rate of water-antifreeze circulated through the slinky pipe and heat exchanger, and outside and inside air temperatures. They were measured simultaneously during 24 hours in one minute interval, then collected data were transferred and saved to the PC. The measurement data for heating season from February 20 to April 1, 2012 and for cooling season from June 3 to September 1, 2012 were performed and analyzed. Average values of Coefficient of Performance for the GCHP (COPHP) and the system (COPS) were obtained as 3.8, 3.3 and 3.2, 3.0 for both seasons, respectively. The results show that this type of system can be used safely, reliably and efficiently for Gaziantep climatic conditions.Keywords: Heat pump; Coefficient of Performance (COP); heat exchanger; heating; cooling.