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  4. Long-term performance and life cycle assessment of energy piles in three different climatic conditions
 
research article

Long-term performance and life cycle assessment of energy piles in three different climatic conditions

Sütman, Melis  
•
Speranza, Gianluca  
•
Ferrari, Alessio  
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2020
Renewable Energy

The main purpose behind the use of energy piles is to enable the exploitation of geothermal energy for meeting the heating/cooling demands of buildings in an efficient and environment-friendly manner. However, the long-term performance of energy piles in different climatic conditions, along with their actual environmental impacts, has not been fully assessed. In this paper, the results of a finite element model taking into consideration the heating and cooling demands of a reference building, and the intermittent operation of a ground source heat pump, are revealed to examine the long-term performance of energy piles. Furthermore, a life cycle assessment model is implemented to compare the environmental performance of energy piles and a group of conventional piles. The environmental enhancement provided by the adoption of a ground source heat pump system is quantified with respect to a conventional heating and cooling system. The obtained results show that (i) the energy pile system can meet the majority of the heating/cooling demands, except during the peak demands, (ii) the geothermal operation results in temperature fluctuations within the energy piles and the soil, (iii) the use of energy piles results in a significant reduction in environmental impacts in the majority of the examined cases.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1016/j.renene.2019.07.035
Author(s)
Sütman, Melis  
Speranza, Gianluca  
Ferrari, Alessio  
Larrey-Lassalle, Pyrène
Laloui, Lyesse  
Date Issued

2020

Published in
Renewable Energy
Volume

146

Start page

1177

End page

1191

Subjects

geothermal energy

•

heat transfer

•

energy pile

•

space heating–cooling

•

life cycle assessment

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
LMS  
FunderGrant Number

FNS

N. 200021_175500, Division II

H2020

H2020-MSCA-ITN-2015-675762

RelationURL/DOI

IsSupplementedBy

http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3304187
Available on Infoscience
July 10, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/159003
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