Patent attributes
An in-ground geothermal heat pump (GHP) closed loop optimization method is disclosed for designing, analyzing, optimizing, controlling, and simulating a detailed model and analysis of a building's in-ground geothermal heat pump system, including borehole length, number of boreholes, heat pump capacity, grid layout, total electric operating costs, efficiency ratios, and hybrid designs, among others. In one aspect of the disclosure described herein, the GHP optimization method can reliably and efficiently predict and optimized the fluctuations of the GHP equipment performance in very small increments which enable the determination of energy consumption and demand information on a specific and unique hourly schedule basis for the building design, including incorporating thermal load data for each individual zone of the building. More specifically, the small increment method here can be used to eliminate overly broad approximations by evaluating GHP performance that is specific to building dynamics, constants, and variables for all of the building individual zones and the building's hourly operating schedule, thereby providing an efficient, reliable, simple, and effective geothermal heat pump design and simulation model.
